More Ultramarines from Black Library

• THE CHRONICLES OF URIEL VENTRIS •

BOOK 1: NIGHTBRINGER
BOOK 2: WARRIORS OF ULTRAMAR
BOOK 3: DEAD SKY, BLACK SUN
BOOK 4: THE KILLING GROUND
BOOK 5: COURAGE AND HONOUR
BOOK 6: THE CHAPTER’S DUE
Graham McNeill

• DAWN OF FIRE •

BOOK 1: AVENGING SON
Guy Haley

BOOK 2: THE GATE OF BONES
Andy Clark

INDOMITUS
Gav Thorpe

• DARK IMPERIUM •

BOOK 1: DARK IMPERIUM
BOOK 2: PLAGUE WAR
Guy Haley

OF HONOUR AND IRON
Ian St. Martin

KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
Nick Kyme

DAMNOS
Nick Kyme

VEIL OF DARKNESS
An audio drama
Nick Kyme

BLOOD OF IAX
Robbie MacNiven

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Book I

1

2

3

4

Book II

5

6

7

8

Book III

9

10

11

12

13

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

Yet, He is a rotting carcass, the Carrion Lord of the Imperium held in life by marvels from the Dark Age of Technology and the thousand souls sacrificed each day so that His may continue to burn.

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

This is a dark and terrible era where you will find little comfort or hope. Forget the power of technology and science. Forget the promise of progress and advancement. Forget any notion of common humanity or compassion.

There is no peace amongst the stars, for in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

‘That we, in our arrogance, believed that humankind was first among the races of this galaxy will be exposed as folly of the worst kind upon the awakening of these ancient beings. Any hopes, dreams or promises of salvation are naught but dust in the wind.’

– Excerpted from the Dogma Omniastra

‘One general law leads to the advancement of all life forms, be they organic or biomechanical: let the strongest live and the weakest die.’

– Magos Genetor Nexin Orlandriaz

Book I

NOSTOS

‘An Astartes warrior may be remade for other purposes and roles as the demands of the battlefield require, but care must be taken that he yet functions as before. He carries his whole history with him – in his very structure is written the history of the Imperium.’

– The Primarch Guilliman

1

Before she was inducted into the Astra Militarum, Corporal Elia Vivaro used to believe war was waged in black and white. Devotionals of heroic troopers in distant warzones were always grainy and monochrome, bleached of colour by distance or distortion. The soldiers’ uniforms were grey, ochre, olive drab or urban camo. That made sense; a bright uniform would get you killed.

But since coming to Sycorax, she’d learned war was fought in hideous technicolour.

Lying on her back with the breath punched out of her and her left arm singing with pain, she watched humming emerald beams flash overhead. Return fire from the company flashed back in bolts of ruby light. Her ears were ringing, the hard thump thump thump of mass-reactives barely registering. Beneath the booming reports of the heavy bolter, she thought she heard the thudding echoes of autocannons.

Ours or theirs?

Imperial, of course. This enemy didn’t use hard rounds. They used inhuman xenotech that flayed the skin from your bones and left their targets a screaming mess of ruptured red meat and disassembled bone. Impossible technologies not even the all-knowing Cult Mechanicus could fathom.

The patch of sky she could see through the billowing, tar-black fog of fire and smoke was a perfect blue.

Surely too beautiful a sky to die under.

Elia pushed herself up onto one elbow, the one not singing in pain. Fuel from the wrecked Hellhounds turned the day into a hellish sunset, painting the shattered walls on either side of her in flickering patterns of orange and yellow. Their crews lay beside the burning vehicles, bodies char-black and bloated, exposed ribs brilliant white.

They had only just made the turn when the ambushers had struck.

A pair of tall, rust-bronze war machines stalked from the burning ruins on four clicking spindle limbs and fired beams of white-green energy at the lead Demolisher. They peeled away its frontal glacis and blew the Leman Russ apart from the inside, lofting its bombardment turret twenty metres into the air. Simultaneously, the rearguard Eradicator was swarmed with a host of drone-like creatures that flew out of the smoke to fasten themselves to its hull like limpets. They reduced it to a skeletal wreck in seconds. The vehicle’s magazine of subatomic shells exploded before they devoured it entirely, and now Elia’s rad-meter was chirruping madly.

Radiation from the wreck of the Eradicator was the least of her worries just then.

Who’s in command now?

She’d seen Captain Mosar turn to issue their convoy a punch-through order from the cupola of his Chimera. Before he could speak, his body had come apart in a flurry of green light and unravelling skin and bone. Lieutenant Rheman died moments later as another of the flitting drone things flew at his head and exploded with a pop that seemed altogether too small to kill a man. He lay on his back a few metres away, looking for all the world like he was sleeping. The only mark on him was a leaking red hole in his forehead.

The red blood was so vivid against the black of her skin, so bright it looked fake, like something you might see in a theatrica. She didn’t think it was hers. She didn’t feel like she’d been shot, but knew that sometimes shock delayed pain. Only yesterday – or was it the day before? – Trooper Maslow had wandered around with his arm flayed back to perforated bone and twitching sinews, but hadn’t seemed to notice he’d been hit until Commissar Vartan yelled at him to take cover. Her breath tasted of engine fumes and smashed rockcrete. Veils of dust and smoke hung in the air, coating the rubble and the wrecked tanks and shaken troopers in layers of chalky dust.

Hands fumbled with Elia’s flak jacket and she felt herself being dragged out of the road. Her rescuer pulled her behind a makeshift barricade of smashed machinery and slabs of a coffered floor that must have fallen from somewhere above. Sound roared in her ears, a deafening cacophony of gunfire, explosions and screams.

A yelling face appeared in front of her. A trooper with blue-polarised goggles and wearing the dust-caked uniform of a 161st Caen Pioneer and Construction Battalion vox-bearer. She knew her, but the ringing in her head made it impossible to think straight. She couldn’t place her name.

The other woman shouted again, her voice muffled by a dust-mask rebreather.

‘Are you hurt? Elia, are you hurt? I saw you thrown from the Chimera!’

‘Kyra?’ she said, dazed and trying to struggle to her feet. ‘Kyra Vance!’

Kyra gave her a strange look and hauled Elia down and pushed her back into the piled rubble. Hissing shots pulped the brickwork above her head. Dissolved molecules of aerosolised mortar caught in the back of her throat. She spat the sour taste of clay from her mouth, her saliva red with blood.

‘Imperator! Are you trying to get killed?’ asked Kyra.

Elia shook her head, and drew in a hot, sucking breath as sense returned to her and reality crashed back in. ‘Situation?’ she said.

‘All six vehicles wrecked. At least twenty dead. Enemy above and either side of us.’

‘Twenty, shit,’ said Elia, easing out to the edge of the toppled slab to re-establish some situational awareness. Even a cursory glance told her it wasn’t good. The remains of the company were strung out along the burning line of the convoy, hunched in whatever cover they could find and firing up at the structures around them.

A missile streaked through the window of a fire-blackened warehouse and exploded inside. A portion of the modular outer wall fell into the street in a rain of girders and stone. A pair of bodies armoured in the same rust-bronze plates as the war machines came with it. Impossibly, one of the figures began to rise, its broken arms and legs limned with green light, but a volley of las-fire cut it down before Elia could get a good look at it.

‘Where’s my rifle?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kyra, leaning back to scoop up a dead man’s lasgun. She pressed it into her hands. ‘Use this one.’

Elia checked the powercell, worked the charging lever, and shouldered the rifle. She snapped off a couple of shots over the rubble into the smoke. Couldn’t tell if she was hitting anything. Didn’t matter. She just wanted to fight back, feel like she was doing something.

‘I saw Mosar and Rheman go down, so who’s in charge?’ asked Elia.

‘If those officers are dead, it’s you,’ said Kyra, flinching as something exploded overhead.

They pressed themselves deeper into the heaped rubble as pulverised chunks of rockcrete tumbled from the upper floors, and more grey dust billowed. Elia’s eyes were red and burning from the smoke, and she wiped a bloody, sweat-streaked hand over her face to clear the stinging grit. The vox-bead crackled in her ear, lousy with static bleed from other company networks. Nothing but chopped words, half-heard orders and calls for help. She reached up to key her helmet mic, but the stalk was snapped midway along its length.

‘Damn it,’ she hissed, rolling onto her back and slapping Kyra’s shoulder. ‘Where’s your vox-caster? My mic’s broken.’

‘Still strapped down inside the Chimera,’ said Kyra.

‘What the hell use is it in there?’ demanded Elia.

‘It was either leave it or die,’ snapped Kyra, still firing over the lip of the rubble.

‘Damn it,’ said Elia again.

Across the street, a trooper skidded into cover behind a slumped wall upon which the face of an Imperial saint had been painted. The trooper was a recklessly brave soldier named Vigo Tengger, a rear-echelon schematics draughter, but one who’d earned a brace of medals in every campaign in which the regiment had served. Elia didn’t recognise the saint, but given the industriousness of Port Setebos, she guessed it was likely one who extolled the virtue and noble rewards of silent devotion to hard work. An explosive round sailed from Vigo’s grenade launcher with a metallic cough and another section of warehouse wall tumbled into the street, along with more of the bronzed enemy warriors.

The relentless thump thump thump of the heavy bolter punched through the prefabbed wall-skins, the fire-teams walking their shots around the perimeter. Elia had never loved a weapon more right now. If anything would keep the enemy’s heads down while they regrouped and got clear of this trap, then it was a heavy bolter.

She heard more shouts and the clatter of ammo boxes. Across the street, Commissar Vartan was directing the company’s heavy weapons teams’ fields of fire. Spectral light reflected from the bronze skull on his peaked cap and breastplate. Crackling blue energies enveloped the gleaming silver of his sword blade. Vartan was the most courageous man she’d ever met, fearless in the face of the foe, and with an unrelenting faith in the Emperor.

The heavy, chugging bark of autocannons joined the heavy bolter, their echoes amplified by the enclosing walls of the shattered warehouses to either side. Their company were pioneers, builders and engineers for the Caen Regiment, but they were still, first and foremost, soldiers of the Astra Militarum.

Solid slugs from the autocannons swept the width of the street. Smacking impacts of brass on stone, hard las ricochets zipping into the sky. Petrochemical fog made it hard to see if the gunners were hitting anything.

Doesn’t matter, so long as it keeps the enemy’s heads down long enough for us to escape.

Vartan looked across the street, beckoned urgently for her to join him.

‘Shit, is he serious?’ said Kyra. ‘He wants to advance?’

‘We need to link up, regroup and move out as one.’

‘The street’s a kill-box,’ said Kyra, as another blast of fizzing green bolts stabbed down it. A wrecked Chimera exploded to help make her point. Crackling powercell overloads lit it from within and fire-trails streaked from its burning interior.

A burst of autocannon shells strafed the upper levels of the warehouses, demolishing more and more of their structure with every explosive impact.

‘We can make it. We’ve got cover, so let’s not waste it,’ said Elia. ‘On three, ready?’

Kyra nodded, biting her lip. Green bolts zipped down the street, neon bright. Any one of them might have their names on it.

‘One,’ said Elia.

‘Two,’ said Kyra.

‘Three!’ snapped Elia.

They burst from the shelter of the rubble and ran into the street as the autocannons opened up again. Kyra led the way, zigging and zagging as streaking bursts of fire twitched the smoke. Elia had never run so fast, her gaze fixed on the exact location she’d skid into cover, just behind a projecting spur of brickwork. She kept low, lasgun held tight to her chest. A buzzing green burst of energy chewed up the ground beside her. She jinked to the side. Kept going, head down, shoulders pumping.

‘Movement! End of the street!’ yelled a gunner’s voice.

Halfway across the street, Elia risked a glance to her left. Something metallic gleamed in the smoke, and her pace faltered.

‘Shit…’

The war machines that had taken out the Demolisher stalked from the ruins once again, glowing green machine eyes sweeping the street. Tall and slender, with bulbous, overhanging carapaces, they were borne on clawed legs that looked far too thin to bear their weight. Marching through the fire ahead of them were ranks of the rust-bronze-armoured warriors advancing in lockstep with lambent-barrelled rifles.

Except they weren’t armoured, the bronze was the metal of their bodies.

Necrons, that’s what we call them…

An apt name, wrought to conjure humankind’s primal fear of death. Their bodies were hunched, thin and skeletal, their gaunt, expressionless faces freakishly elongated skulls of bare metal. The same green corpse-light that powered their weapons burned in each hollow eye socket, and every one of them had a mockery of a human skull crudely painted across their lifeless, death-mask faces.

In the centre of their line was a drifting mass of spiralling dark energy. It swirled around an arch-spined thing like overlapping tornadoes contained by a fearsome gravity at its heart. It threw off arcing traceries of jade lightning, its hunched-over body swathed in tattered, purple robes. It carried a bladed staff that flickered as it cut the very fabric of reality.

The aliens raised their weapons in perfect unison, but before they could shoot, the impossibly deep rumble of a powerful engine-reactor filled the street. Elia turned as a mud-streaked behemoth reared up to crest the debris behind her, crushing rubble to powder beneath its armoured bulk.

It was a battle tank, but not one of the Astra Militarum. Its blue-painted flanks were more massive than anything Elia had seen. Its eagle-stamped tracks churned the broken ground, throwing up stonework and dust as the driver brought it to a grinding halt. Elia had watched enough devotionals to recognise this type of vehicle, but to see one bearing down on her like a vast transit train all but pinned her to the spot.

Land Raider, Hellfire variant.

The twin lascannons on its side-mounts thrummed with building power.

Godhammer-pattern…

The front assault ramp, emblazoned with an ivory ultima, slammed down with a booming clang like the glorious peal of a prayer bell. Shapes moved within its red-lit interior, hulking and brutish; surely too enormous to be human. They burst from within, ten warriors in cobalt-blue armour, their edges trimmed in green.

Adeptus Astartes… Space Marines, the Angels of Death…

Elia had scoffed at the veterans’ tales of the Astartes – old soldiers’ lies of immortal warriors of inhuman power, deathly killers. A single squad of them could topple a world, so they said.

If anything, the stories had undersold their might.

They spread out fast, firing on the move with weapons that would take two strong men to lift. The thunderous noise broke the spell holding Elia in place, and she dropped to the ground, fearful of being trampled by their relentless advance.

A giant with a red helm and gleaming augmetic arm paused to glance down at her.

‘Stay down if you want to survive this,’ he said.

Elia stayed down.

The Space Marines advanced under fire, never seeming like they were running, but closing the distance to the necrons in moments. Mass-reactives from their bolters exploded with booming detonations, punching holes in the alien line with a deafening barrage. Against a living foe, that one volley would have ended the fight, but already some of the deathly creatures were writhing and jerking as their bodies began to knit themselves back together.

The Land Raider fired again, and searing beams of energy carved through the carapace of the first claw-legged war machine. A rippling green halo flared, but whatever energy shielding it possessed couldn’t save it. The machine exploded in a fountain of emerald fire, its headless trunk swaying for a moment before collapsing in a molten pile of scrap metal.

The second machine loosed an ululating machine-bray and fired a pulsing beam of light that played over the up-armoured front of the vehicle. Colossally thick plates of armour were stripped back under the awful beam: ablative mesh, layer upon layer of ceramite weave, adamantium rebar and ballistic plate dissolving like grease before a flame.

Then the war machine rocked back on its flexing legs, a plume of orange fire engulfing its segmented optical apparatus as a flurry of missiles exploded around its upper section. It tilted back, scanning the skies in search of this new threat.

Elia heard it before she saw it. A shrieking raptor’s roar, a triumphant predator in the instant before it claims its victim.

A screaming blaze of jet wash parted the black smoke roofing the street, and Elia looked up to see a snub-nosed gunship drop with a subsonic shriek. Its armoured skin was the same cobalt blue of the Land Raider. Its prow dipped as its wings flared in vortices of smoke, and the twin cannons mounted atop the craft opened up.

A blitzing fusillade of explosive rounds cut through the ranks of necrons, tossing shredded bodies into the air. Smoke and dust erupted in a billowing wall as the aircraft’s gunner worked his storm of fire from side to side. Elia’s eyes widened as the gunship levelled out and she saw the massive form of a walking war machine locked at its rear.

Dreadnought…

The magnetic clamps holding it in place disengaged, and it fell the last ten metres. The Dreadnought slammed into the ground, cratering the roadway. Its midsection spun on its axis, and Elia saw one massive fist clench, throwing off arcs of blue-purple lightning, the other a vast rotary cannon that spun up with terrible velocity.

At the same instant, the gunship’s prow ramp opened and six warriors leapt from within, firing as they dropped – precision bursts of lethally efficient fire. Armoured in pristine blue, they fell through the black smoke and landed alongside the Dreadnought.

Elia wanted to warn them that sometimes the enemy came back, even from hideously mortal wounds, but they already knew. Kill shot, followed by execution shot. Lines of plasma crackled among them, green and blue light. Coruscating flames washed over them, but none of these warriors of the Emperor fell.

The Space Marines borne in the Land Raider split into two fire-teams, moving seamlessly to the smaller unit’s flanks. The gunship jinked to avoid incoming streams of fire, and banks of strafing bolter weapons demolished the buildings to either side of the street in an unending string of percussive blasts. Pulverised debris fell into the street, together with more shredded necron bodies.

A swelling pride expanded in Elia’s chest like the heat from a slug of amasec. Ignoring the admonition of the Space Marine who’d spoken to her, she pushed herself to her feet and snapped a glance left and right.

Dust cascaded from her uniform as she saw Commissar Vartan pull himself from the rubble and draw his sword. The blade ignited with a whoosh of golden heat, a beacon of courage in the fog of the conflict. He saw her and drew his bolt pistol, aiming his sword towards the advancing Space Marines. The implication was clear: advance or die.

Elia scrambled over the torn-up slabs of the street to finally reach Vartan.

‘Time for you to step up, corporal,’ said the commissar as she skidded into cover.

Technically, Vartan outranked her, but a good officer of the Officio Prefectus preferred to remain outside the chain of command, stepping in to take over with sanctioned executions for cowardice only when necessary.

Elia nodded and said, ‘Commissar, take Kyra, and round up a pair of sections. Make sure you’ve got a couple of heavy hitters and sweep to the right along the street edge. I’ll push up the centre with the assault elements. Drive them to us.’

Vartan nodded and began issuing orders as Elia gathered up the soldiers equipped with pistols, swords and grenades. She checked her pistol and the remaining charge on the lasgun Kyra had given her: charged enough.

She swept her eyes over the soldiers she’d assembled. Perhaps twenty gathered behind her – too many for any one person to effectively command, but she only needed them to hear one order.

Elia pushed herself upright and shouted, ‘Soldiers of Caen! Up! Up!’ She clambered over the rubble, not even looking to see if the pioneers would follow her. She already knew they would; they were courageous and disciplined and understood that going forward was the only way to stay alive.

Elia paused at the crest of the rubble. It was stupid, she was exposed, but if she lived through the next few minutes, it would cement her reputation as a leader.

‘The Angels of Death fight with us!’ she cried, holding her rifle high. ‘Shall the Astra Militarum be found wanting?’

The soldiers roared in response, running alongside her as she charged towards the foe. She kept her gun held tight to her chest, one eye on the broken ground, the other on the swirling mass of smoke and fire ahead.

The Land Raider ground past on her left, its immensely powerful lascannons blazing; blindingly bright, ear-splittingly loud. The energies of its weapon systems set her teeth on edge, its giant engine sent tremors through her bones.

Snapping bolts of green flashed past her. Something tugged at her shoulder. She felt wet heat, but kept going. On towards the gunfire and blazing swords. On towards the streaks of plasmic fire and the screech of buckling metal.

And then they were in the thick of it. And Elia saw, first-hand, why the Space Marines were called the Angels of Death.

The speed of it, that was what she later remembered the most.

Militarum battles were endless, bloody slogs – methodical, relentless, sensory overloads of noise and terror that every soldier had to gut their way through. Bombardment, advance, fight, survive, dig in. Snatch a moment to eat if you had any food, try and sleep in a muddy foxhole, then get kicked awake before dawn to do it all again.

Campaigns lasted months or years.

This fight was over in forty-five seconds.

She ran into the smoke. The bark and snap of gunfire sounded from the flank. Hissing las-impacts filled the air with the stink of hot metal and dry earth. The bruising crunch of metal on metal, grunts of effort, the hiss and crack of splitting metal innards. All-too-human screams of pain.

A shape moved in the smoke. She spun with her lasgun shouldered.

A Space Marine, towering head and shoulders above her. She saw him in snapshots. Armour bulkier and more adorned with honour markers and waxen seals than the others. Jade-edged pauldrons, ivory and wreathed in gold. A belt-fed bolter weapon mounted on his gauntlet that blazed with fire. Spread-winged eagle upon his breastplate, gleaming the brightest gold.

He held a bronzed necron thing by the throat, half its body missing, but its arms still clawing at his plate. Like an enginseer loosening a stubborn driveshaft, he beat its metal skull with his fist. Every crunching impact deformed its expressionless face until it was just a mass of brutalised iron.

The light in its eye sockets dimmed, and he slammed its broken body onto the ground. With hard-won economy of movement born from decades of war, he crushed its skull underfoot even as he turned to draw his sword and aim his gauntlet-mounted bolt weapon.

The sword flared with white-gold light, the gauntlet bolter spoke in thunderous roars. His warriors were wolves in the fold, as unified in killing purpose as pack predators.

The brutal form of the Dreadnought formed the tip of a hunter’s spear thrust deep into the enemy’s gut. It tore xenoforms apart with its massive fist, its cannon spewing spent shell casings in a glittering rain. Space Marines moved with it, firing on the move with pinpoint accuracy and perfect interlocking arcs.

Mass-reactives or thunderclaps of melta fire blasted gaps in the enemy line. Assault elements punched in deep. Thick-bladed swords, barking pistols and reversed combat knives cut, hacked and gouged.

Nothing was left standing in their wake.

Always on the move, each finger of this blue fist worked in perfect synchrony to tear the beating heart from the necron ambush. It was war waged at its most disciplined and perfect, no element unsupported, every movement as precise as if this were no more than a parade ground demonstration. They fought fluidly, efficiently and lethally.

But what astonished Elia the most was their speed. Astartes statuary always looked so solid and unbending. She had imagined them as living tanks, but they were graceful and inhumanly fast. She felt compelled to fight with them, but the idea of getting close to a warring Space Marine filled her with terror.

She pushed that terror down into the pit of her stomach. She was Astra Militarum, and fear was no excuse not to go forward into the fray.

Something powerful clamped around her ankle, like she’d stepped in a snare. Elia went down on one knee, cracking her elbow on a fallen roof beam. Her lasgun skittered away over the rubble.

She looked back and saw it wasn’t a snare. It was the still-living necron thing the Space Marine had killed. The xenoform tried to lift itself from the ground, but its legs were sheared away, its pelvis twisted around. The metal torso was half blown open by an explosive shell and its gaping chest cavity crawled with slithering tendrils of eldritch light. It spasmed as the craters punched in its skull groaned and popped, the metal reforming. It pulled itself up her legs, clawing to reach her.

Elia cried out in revulsion, desperately reaching for her lasgun. Her fingers scrabbled in the dust, the rifle’s stock just out of reach. Alien fingers pulled at her stomach, hard metal pushing under her uniform jacket to tear out the soft meat beneath.

Her fingers brushed the edge of the lasgun’s stock. An explosion shook the ground. Dust and rock fragments rained down and the weapon slid farther out of reach. She screamed as the necron’s unyielding fingers pressed hard into her stomach. Blunt as they were, it had strength enough to disembowel her. She rolled onto her side and snatched her laspistol from its holster.

The necron lifted its head. Green wych-fire guttered in its deformed skull.

Elia shot it through its right eye socket.

Its head snapped back, one side of its face vaporised. The inside of its head was a hollow, empty void. She heard an endless scream that seemed to echo within her own skull.

The pressure on her gut only intensified. She cried out in agony, and emptied the rest of the pistol’s charge into its face until nothing was left but a twitching spinal column that oozed noxious, metallic fumes. But the headless torso continued to climb her body, a ghastly metal corpse trying to drag her down into death with it.

Elia dropped the pistol and hauled her combat knife from its sheath. She jammed it down onto the writhing spinal column, screaming as she plunged the blade in deep. She twisted and cranked the blade, trying to do as much damage as she could.

Finally, it stopped moving.

Elia let out a pent-up breath and shoved its scrap-metal carcass off her. Swirling green energies enveloped its remains as it clattered to the rubble and began to fade from sight. Revolted, Elia scrambled away from its dissolution. Even in death they were unnatural, abhorrent things.

She didn’t notice how silent the street had become until she heard heavy footsteps drawing near. The Space Marine she’d seen earlier approached her, so tall and immensely powerful that she almost tried to retreat from him.

‘The fighting is done,’ he said. ‘Are you hurt?’

Elia’s mouth was too gummed with dust and fear to reply, so she just shook her head.

The warrior offered her his hand, and she stared at it, dumbly wondering what to do with it until her rational mind reasserted itself. She gripped his smoking blue gauntlet, her hand tiny in his. She marvelled at his control. Strength to shatter steel, but still his grip was precisely strong enough to pull her upright and no more.

She grunted in pain, pressing her free hand to her stomach.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked again.

Elia opened her uniform jacket and pulled up her shirt. The pale flesh of her stomach was already purpling with bruising where the xenos had tried to rip her guts out.

‘Sometimes they come back,’ she said, her voice thick with lingering fear and relief.

‘Yes, sometimes they do,’ he said. ‘Apologies, I should have ensured this necron was fully destroyed.’ He turned to rejoin his warriors.

‘Elia,’ she said, her words coming out in a rush. ‘I’m Corporal Elia Vivaro. May I be permitted to know your name?’

He nodded and said, ‘I am Uriel Ventris, captain of the Ultramarines Fourth Company.’

2

Uriel turned from the Militarum officer, clearing the feed-lines of his boltstorm gauntlet.

The weapon still felt new to him, not yet fully meshed with his personal combat doctrines. He missed the feel of a good bolter in his hands, but had to admit the power of this new weapon was astonishing. He’d fired only a few bursts before the combat became better suited for bladework, and most of his kills had been earned with Idaeus’ sword, the golden-hilted blade that marked his ascension to captaincy of the Fourth.

His command squad were gathered around the hulking form of venerable Brother Zethus, whose Dreadnought chassis bore a dozen fresh scars from this latest engagement. Dubbed the Swords of Calth, this band of brothers had formed during the Bloodborn invasion of Ultramar, and had served Uriel faithfully ever since those dark days.

Petronius Nero knelt with his sword held vertically before him, tip to the ground and his forehead pressed to its hilt. The words of sanctity were for his blade and shield for serving him well in the fight. Livius Hadrianus and Brutus Cyprian argued over the arcs of fire they’d covered. Ancient Peleus stood, ramrod straight, next to Brother Zethus, etching a kill-tally into the vast plates of his venerable brother’s sarcophagus. As much a scholar as a warrior, Peleus had mastered the ancient script of Macragge, and at each victory honoured Zethus with an appropriate line from the Battle King Konor’s writings.

This one read, Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

‘Apothecary Selenus, report,’ said Uriel.

‘No injuries,’ said Apothecary Selenus. ‘But Cyprian’s pride might need a salve after that fall when he landed.’

The big warrior looked over and said, ‘I land harder than anyone else, and that slab was weakened already.’

‘Zethus managed to stay upright when he landed,’ pointed out Livius Hadrianus.

‘Lower centre of gravity,’ retorted Cyprian, slapping a shovel-like palm on the Dreadnought’s arm plating.

Zethus turned his giant body towards Cyprian, the fibre-bundle muscles of his giant power fist thrumming with mechanical energies and potent with destructive power.

‘I tore the head off the last thing that hit me like that,’ he warned, before turning to Uriel and saying, ‘Did we get it?’

Uriel shook his head. ‘No. The necrons were already phasing out before I could close with the target.’

‘Does Adept Komeda have its signature? Can we follow it?’ asked Peleus.

Uriel looked up at the hovering Stormraven and said, ‘I imagine he’s working on that as we speak.’

‘Then we should return to Anchorage Citadel,’ said Zethus. ‘The necrons are gone, but they will return in greater numbers if we linger.’

Uriel nodded. ‘Bring Illyrium Lux down. We’ll evacuate immediately.’

A voice spoke behind him – a voice from the past, but which he knew as well as his own.

‘Uriel? Is… is that you…?’

He turned to see a warrior wearing a red helmet with an encircling ivory laurel. A veteran sergeant of the Ultramarines.

But not just any veteran sergeant… Pasanius.

Once he had thought Pasanius huge, a giant among his battle-brothers, and indeed he was. To accommodate his enormous frame, the Techmarines had forged his armour from a hybrid blend of parts taken from Aquila and Tactical Dreadnought armour, but Uriel now saw he wore a modified suit of Mark X Tacticus plate.

After crossing the Rubicon Primaris, Uriel was now half a head taller.

‘Pasanius, I–’ was all he managed before his old friend threw his arms around him and pulled him close, one fist beating the backplate of his armour.

Pasanius Lysane had fought by Uriel’s side as his sergeant for decades, but he had been so much more than that. Brothers since their cadet days at Agiselus, they had faced a star god, the Great Devourer, Traitor Legions of the Ruinous Powers, heretics and xenos, and had even trodden the blood-soaked soil of a daemon world. Through every victory, every loss and every drop of blood, Pasanius had been his loyal friend, his stalwart ally and, most of all, his most beloved brother.

So why did he feel so little emotion at seeing him again?

Eventually, Pasanius stepped back to release the locks on his gorget. He removed his helm to reveal the face of a serial pugilist, with service studs implanted in his granite brow and many more scars than Uriel remembered.

Uriel removed his own helmet, dark hair and beard now salted with grey, his face made stern by the alchemies wrought during the transformation into his new Primaris form. He tasted the damp air of Sycorax, a world whose atmosphere had not filled his lungs in decades, but whose unique combination of burnt metal, mud and fired stone brought memories of fighting the invading greenskin host to the forefront of his memory.

‘Imperator, it’s good to see you, Uriel,’ said Pasanius.

‘It’s good to see you brother-captain,’ said Petronius Nero.

Uriel waved Nero back. ‘If anyone has earned the right to forego my rank, it is Pasanius.’

Pasanius stepped back and looked him up and down. ‘Imperator, so you’re one of them now? A bloody Primaris Marine? We all knew Lord Calgar had taken the Primaris Oath, but we’ve heard almost nothing from Indomitus since the fleets left Terra… All kinds of bleak rumours, of course… that you’d died or that you’d remained on the Throneworld. Damn, it’s good to see you, brother, the Fourth’s needed its captain. Now, I want to hear about Terra and the crusade. Is Lord Guilliman here? You’ve spoken to him, yes?’

‘I have,’ said Uriel. ‘But our primarch is not here, my friend. The crusade is many sectors distant, and–’

‘Captain Ventris,’ said Brother Zethus as the thunderous force of Illyrium Lux’s engines filled the broken street with dust and flying debris. ‘Reunions can wait – we need to go. My augurs are detecting energy spikes consistent with incoming necron activity from every approach.’

The roaring Stormraven touched down in the centre of the street, and Livius Hadrianus and Brutus Cyprian immediately began attaching its maglock cables to the upper surfaces of Brother Zethus’ chassis.

Uriel put a hand to Pasanius’ pauldron and said, ‘We will talk later, my friend.’

‘You’re going back to Anchorage?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I’ll come with you. You’ve space enough, and there’s a lot I need to know.’

‘Like what?’ asked Uriel as the frontal ramp lowered.

‘For starters, if the Indomitus Crusade is so far away, what brings you to Sycorax?’

Uriel had only set foot in the primarch’s chambers once before. Every other time he’d beheld his gene-sire had been within the embarkation decks of Macragge’s Honour or on the surface of whatever world he’d chosen as their next conquest.

Roboute Guilliman hated that word. Conquest.

Once, in the smoking ruins of a ramshackle greenskin fort, he’d spoken of the first time he and his primarch brothers took their fleets out into the galaxy. How it had been a time of glorious reunification, a time when war was a last resort, a time when the Emperor had walked among His sons.

‘How many times must we fight to claim the galaxy?’ he’d said, looking past the stars to something only he could see. ‘How long until we are finally done?’ Uriel had wanted to ask more about those lost days, but something in the primarch’s bearing told him it was a private reverie.

His petition for a personal audience had taken several months to reach the primarch’s eyes and be authorised. The transit aboard a boxy torchbearer gunship from the Red Redemptor, a Mechanicus forge-vessel of Battle Group Quaestor, had taken what felt like an eternity, and the long, painful climb to the gilded spire of Lord Guilliman’s chambers aboard Macragge’s Honour was an endless march into an uncertain future.

The Gloriana-class battleship had changed immeasurably since the Calthian shipwrights had first laid the adamantium spine of its keel. The Martian priesthood had restored the ship to its former glory and beyond, with retrofitted halls and thoroughfares awash with new systems that made the grand old dame of the Ultramarian fleet more deadly than ever. The Mechanicus crew and its servitor maniples were not the hunched things of old, but ruddy-cheeked beings that could almost pass for baseline humans. Their robes were bright, their augmetics glittering and of strangely beautiful design.

If anything symbolised this new age of the reborn Imperium, it was Macragge’s Honour.

Lord Guilliman’s private chambers stood in stark opposition to the clean lines, gilded pillars and engraved coffers of the ship beyond; its walls bare of ornamentation beyond what was strictly necessary for the prosecution of the many campaign fronts. Where the rest of Macragge’s Honour was reborn, this inner sanctum felt like it had steadfastly resisted the march of time and remained fixed in an earlier age. Even the many guards without were clad in suits of hissing, clattering Mark III plate with transverse crested helms and overlapping plates. Ornate relics of a bygone age.

A great granite desk, hewn from the glittering rocks around the Valley of Laponis, stood pushed to the side of the chamber, its surface covered with data-slates, scrolls and an archaic, brass-fitted cogitator that hummed and chattered to itself. An old footlocker sat between chairs of numerous sizes that were pushed against the walls, enough to seat Astartes warriors and baseline humans.

Roboute Guilliman paced the chamber, moving between long rolls of sector maps held aloft by buzzing servo-skulls and surrounded by projected hard-light holos that shifted in response to the movements of his head and eyes. Uriel counted at least sixteen theatres of war all across the Indomitus Crusade’s front, and scores of local engagements taking place in as close to real-time as the vast distances of void battle allowed.

The primarch’s hands swept, pinched, expanded and tapped like those of a conductor orchestrating untold numbers of musicians, expanding war-schematics, collapsing logistical reports, and lingering on flickering orders of battle that shifted faster than any mortal could ever hope to process. His mind was an incredible thing, conceived to wage war on unimaginable scales. Uriel immediately felt unworthy to be in his presence, that he was wasting this immortal being’s time with his selfish concerns.

Since his rebirth, Guilliman’s blond hair had developed several streaks of silver, and while his features were still handsome, they were no longer angelically beautiful as depicted in the ancient mosaics. His cheeks had a severe cut to them now, suggestive of a sharper temper and harsher tone than he might have possessed in his past incarnation. Uriel felt a stab of disloyalty at such thoughts, for it was an honour to stand in the presence of this demigod. His primarch remained magnificent, still a lord amongst mortals, for who but a lord of war would the Emperor entrust with the reclamation of the Imperium in this new and terrible dark millennium?

Uriel himself was encased in his Mark X Gravis armour, the plate freshly cleaned and powdered. The fit was still new and the suit didn’t yet feel like a second skin the way his old Mark VII had. That armour, now too small for his newly enhanced Primaris physique, occupied a place of honour within the arming reliquaries aboard the far-distant Vae Victus.

He’d attended to his battle gear himself, dismissing the arming servants that were his due as a battle captain of the Ultramarines. Lord Guilliman appreciated his leaders taking personal ownership of their responsibilities, and he wanted every advantage for this audience.

‘My lord,’ he said to announce his presence, though Guilliman would already be aware.

‘Monaeth Moti,’ said the primarch, without turning from the floating scrolls and holos. ‘It tasks me.’

The capital world of the Revnine Conglomerate had proven a tough nut to crack, with its series of fortress moons locked on artificially engineered orbits to provide a deadly suite of interlocking defensive arrays. Situated at a confluence of stable warp routes, the system’s recapture had been accorded the highest priority.

After five months of brutal void war and punishing orbital assaults, only the outer three moons had fallen, and Uriel felt Guilliman’s chagrin that this fortress-system so delayed him. They all felt it, the burning need to push deeper into galactic space and return to Ultramar. Reports from Macragge spoke of uprisings, predatory frontier raids, virulent pandemics and a developing suspicion that a singular intelligence was at work in the shadows.

‘Admiral Ghota feels certain the fifth moon will be ours within days,’ said Uriel.

‘Do you believe him?’ asked Guilliman, batting the servo-skull displaying the holo of the moon over to Uriel with a backhand sweep. ‘The latest augurs from the scout task-fleets.’ He still hadn’t turned around.

Uriel studied the holo displaying the war-theatre around Monaeth Moti’s fifth moon. Cascading lines of data overlaid swirling elliptical orbits, planes of incline and potential fleet routes in and out of the battle sphere.

‘Orbital plates, defensive star forts, torpedo asteroids, interlocking strato-flak grids,’ he said, scrolling through the reams of data. ‘Orbit-capable ablative-cascade mines, and high-volume inter-system fleet assets. I suspect the admiral is being optimistic.’

‘The admiral is being stupid and reckless,’ snapped Guilliman. ‘I just issued orders to relieve him of command. Commodore Losarev will be the new task force leader.’

‘Does he have a better plan?’

‘Losarev came up through the Martian fleets,’ said Guilliman. ‘He and his Mechanicus contingent have concocted a plan that involves the geoformer fleets’ mass-drivers redirecting the orbit of the outermost fortress moon and using it like a wrecking ball on this target.’

‘Can that be done?’

‘The Mechanicus believe it can, and I suspect they’re right,’ said Guilliman, ‘though even their most conservative predictive models show the target moon utterly destroyed.’

‘It’s a bold plan. Decisive.’

‘You don’t think it somewhat extreme?’

‘Perhaps, but such a display of power might cause the Conglomerate to rethink their continued resistance,’ he said. ‘A furious blow now could save many lives and a great deal of time later. A sector capital for one destroyed moon is a price worth paying.’

‘You might very well be correct, though I had hoped this crusade wouldn’t leave ashes and ruin in our wake,’ said Guilliman, finally turning towards Uriel and killing the holos with a snap of his fingers.

In one glance, he saw how Uriel had changed, his transhuman bulk enhanced to the next iteration of the Adeptus Astartes.

‘I am pleased you survived crossing the Rubicon Primaris,’ said Guilliman. ‘It is no easy thing to volunteer for something that might very well kill you.’

‘I’ve volunteered for many such things over the years,’ said Uriel. ‘We all have.’

Guilliman smiled, and Uriel saw a flash of how the primarch must have been in the time when he first fought alongside his sons.

‘Volunteering to run towards the gunfire isn’t quite the same, but I take your point.’ The primarch gestured to the chairs pushed up against the walls. ‘Sit,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, my lord,’ said Uriel.

Guilliman shook his head and pulled a chair out for Uriel.

‘Sit,’ he said again.

Uriel obeyed, and the primarch pulled a bench seat out from beneath the desk to sit opposite Uriel. The reinforced wood creaked beneath his bulk as his eyes bored into Uriel, taking the full measure of him: his strengths, weaknesses and, crucially, his doubts.

‘So what is it you want of me, Captain Ventris? A petition six months in the making ought to be worth hearing.’

Uriel had thought he’d prepared for this moment, but being face to face with the lord of the Ultramarines had a way of knotting the tongue and fogging the brain.

In the end Guilliman answered for him.

‘You want to rejoin the Fourth on Sycorax,’ said the primarch.

Uriel nodded. ‘It always bothered me how we left that fight, an unfinished tally.’

‘You think you are fit enough? It takes many months for the pain of the surgeries to ebb. Astartes heal fast, but it will take time for you to rebound from such a complete biological transformation. Your entire body is new and untested.’

‘My physiological recovery is above and beyond even the Apothecarion’s most optimistic projections,’ said Uriel. ‘I am stronger, faster and tougher than I ever was before.’

‘I would expect no less from the captain of the Fourth. And the rest?’

‘The rest?’

Guilliman leaned in, and Uriel was struck by the sheer power of the primarch’s proximity. His hard eyes saw the truth behind Uriel’s dissembled words, past his false modesty, and most of all, knew the core of his pain.

‘You think I can’t see to the very heart of my sons?’ said Guilliman, tapping Uriel’s breastplate. ‘Speak true, or your petition will be rejected.’

‘I admit… it has been difficult to regain equilibrium,’ said Uriel. ‘My body is superior in almost every way, but my thoughts are… disturbed.’

‘It isn’t just the body the Rubicon reshapes,’ said Guilliman. ‘Your mind is profoundly altered to enable it to control the new biological hardware grafted to your flesh. And to rewire the mind of an Astartes warrior is no small thing. Your thoughts and emotions are reborn in flames and agony. Many who come back from the crossing are no longer the men they were before. So tell me, are you still Uriel Ventris?’

‘I am who I always was,’ said Uriel.

‘And what dreams have you had?’

‘Dreams, my lord?’

‘Cawl tells me that during the crossing, many Astartes experience lucid dreams or twisted visions of their past. Foes vanquished, lost brothers, that sort of thing. Who did you see?’

Uriel hesitated, knowing it would be a mistake to hold anything back from his primarch.

‘I saw Captain Idaeus. I saw brothers long dead and brothers I wish to see again.’

‘Who else?’

Taking a deep breath, Uriel said, ‘And the Iron Warrior, Honsou.’

‘The Beast of Calth,’ spat Guilliman.

Uriel nodded. ‘I know he wasn’t real, but to see him and to know how close I came to following the path he took…’

‘But you didn’t,’ said Guilliman. ‘And how can anyone say they are strong if they have never been tested? It’s easy to be strong when everything is going well. It’s when things go to hell that true character emerges. And though things have gone to hell a great deal around you, you have prevailed.’

Uriel grinned, but Guilliman wasn’t yet done.

‘It’s what you’ve seen since that’s brought you to my chambers, isn’t it?’

‘My body is new, split from heel to crown and renewed at its most fundamental level…’

‘And yet?’

‘And yet I still bear the scar of an old wound. It burns again, as though in memory of the thing that caused it.’

‘What wound?’

‘The one I took in the dark of Pavonis,’ said Uriel. ‘From the Nightbringer.’

Pasanius let out a shuddering breath, reliving memories of a long-ago fight and a past shame. Uriel thought he saw his friend’s skin pale as he told him what had brought him to Sycorax. Pasanius cradled the dust-smeared augmetic arm that had replaced his limb of flesh and blood – the one the Nightbringer had cut from him on Pavonis.

The gunship juddered as it hit turbulence, and Techmarine Taysen banked around the inferno of a blazing promethium refinery. Whole portions of the city were ablaze, and the greenish air was lousy with rogue thermals, firestorms and choking petrochemical clouds.

Uriel, Pasanius and the Swords of Calth sat locked in armoured bucket seats at the gunship’s prow, while Adept Komeda of the Mechanicus, who had guided the gunship to the ambush, sat in a cramped space behind Taysen’s cockpit, the mechadendrites emerging from his shoulders plugged into a glowing cogitator terminal. The few Militarum personnel who hadn’t been able to squeeze into the damaged Land Raider for evacuation sat in the gunship’s rear, looking in wonder at their surroundings.

They were like children to Uriel, secured in place with cargo straps on the rear stowage benches, dwarfed by the scale of the Astartes gunship and its interior fittings. The corporal who’d asked Uriel’s name conferred with an officer of the Prefectus. Opposite them sat a soldier with a bulky grenade launcher and a woman clutching a scorched vox-caster to her chest like it was a priceless relic.

Pasanius leaned forward and said, ‘You really think it’s here?’ The roar of the Stormraven’s engines all but swallowed his words.

Uriel shrugged. ‘I don’t know, not for sure, but the after-action reports I’ve been reading from the Militarum and civilian authorities make for grim reading. Entire population centres emptied, vanished in the wake of necron attacks. Almost no collateral damage in terms of bodies left behind, aside from fallen Militarum troops. With an attack on this scale, I’d expect the population displacement centres of major cities to be awash with refugees fleeing the fighting, but they’re well below capacity. So where are the people of Sycorax, what’s happening to them?’

Pasanius nodded. ‘This whole campaign has felt off from the beginning. I don’t know how these damned xenos think, I don’t want to know how they think, but it’s like they’re not even trying to fight with any kind of conventional battle plan.’

‘Elaborate upon that,’ said Uriel.

Pasanius thought for a moment before replying.

‘It’s as though their entire strategy is more concerned with isolating high-density civilian populations than attacking military assets,’ he said. ‘And did you see the ones we were fighting down there? Faces all painted with skulls, like damned ork war-woad? And that leader of theirs, what I could see of it… It reminded me of…’

‘The Nightbringer,’ finished Uriel.

‘Aye,’ said Pasanius, leaning back against the Stormraven’s fuselage. ‘Shit, I thought we’d seen the last of that bastard on Pavonis.’

Uriel sighed, remembering the utter emptiness he’d felt looking into the empty, star-killing gaze of the immortal god and the awful choice he’d been forced to make.

He’d saved Pavonis, but the price had been the Nightbringer’s escape.

‘I think some part of me always knew that particular debt would come due. I did what I thought needed to be done in the moment, but how many more lives will be lost because I let that thing out?’

‘Inquisitor Barzano was ready to declare Exterminatus on Pavonis,’ said Pasanius. ‘You did the right thing.’

‘I hope you are right.’

‘But why here?’ asked Pasanius. ‘Why now?’

‘I gave that a lot of thought en route to Sycorax. You remember the last time we were here, after the fight to rescue the royal scions, Casimir and Alexia Nassaur?’

‘Of course. The greenskins captured them out on the mudflats and we rescued them with Telion’s Scouts after Fabian’s flanking attack failed.’

‘We took refuge in an abandoned Mechanicus mining outpost called Variava Station on Mount Shokereth. Adept Komeda was able to reactivate the facility’s cogitator to call down Thunderhawks from the Vae Victus before the orks overran the position.’

‘A close call,’ remembered Pasanius. ‘They almost didn’t make it in time.’

‘Closer than I would have liked,’ admitted Uriel. ‘But just before he disengaged the vox, something strange happened, and another voice spoke through his augmitters.’

‘Yes… something about eagles, if I’m remembering it right.’

‘It said, “Do eagles still circle the mountain?” I did not know what it meant then, but I am beginning to suspect I do now.’

‘What?’

‘When we lifted off, I saw the pilot’s surveyor slates displaying the local environs. It showed Mount Shokereth and the dozens of Mechanicus forge-temples and mines arranged around the mountain in a rough circle. All represented by eagles, and all but one had been overrun by the orks. Variava Station was the last eagle on the display. It was destroyed not long after we departed.’

‘So what does that mean?’

‘I’m not sure, but without eagles circling the mountain, I think something long-buried was activated or triggered. I don’t understand what or how, but I think that voice, that question, was some ancient switch-mechanism that began the awakening of a necron host hidden somewhere deep beneath the surface of Sycorax, maybe a host the Nightbringer once led.’

‘Shit…’ said Pasanius, leaning back. ‘So what do we do?’

‘If the Nightbringer is here, we finish what we started on Pavonis,’ said Uriel.

3

Kaetan’s crosshair was dead centre at the flex-seal between Techmarine Arax’s gorget and helmet. A kill-shot for sure. Not even an Astartes could survive such a pinpoint shot.

The Techmarine looked up from his work on the damaged resonance blocker, turning his helmet in a way that put the centre of the aiming sight over his right eye. Knowing what was coming next, Telion switched the magnocular feed from Kaetan’s Stalker-pattern bolter’s scope to a wider view of the rooftops overlooking the Techmarine and his servitors.

Arax snapped his fingers and Kaetan flinched as a burst of bright and painful feedback flared in his optics.

‘That was uncalled for,’ said Kaetan, turning his head from the gunsight and blinking away the after-image.

‘It’s just Arax’s way of saying to keep your sights looking for enemy targets,’ said Telion with a grin. ‘He’s not wrong.’

‘They say he trained under Harkus,’ said Kaetan, returning his eye to the sight. ‘It shows.’

Techmarine Harkus had been mortally wounded in the Thracian campaign, and interred within a Dreadnought sarcophagus upon his return to Macragge. He still toiled in his giant forge in the Fortress of Hera, and his transformation had only exacerbated his already belligerent nature.

‘Then we know he was trained by one of our best,’ said Telion, letting his gaze drift over the ruined city of Port Setebos. He kept his focus light, not fixing on any one position, but letting his enhanced vision pick out any traces of movement or flickers of light where none should exist. Tricky, when portions of the city were limned in the strange green haze emanating from the dark obelisks inching their way up through the roadways and earth.

Telion and Sergeant Kaetan’s Scout squad had moved into the city in the hours before dark to assume sniper overwatch position in the city’s western outskirts. From the ammoniac stink permeating the interior and the animal skins stretched in drying racks, Telion guessed the structure Kaetan had chosen had once been a tannery. Ordinarily, that would be a sound choice, for the stink would dissuade enemies from occupying it; weary soldiers in a warzone would, if left to their own devices, usually pick locations that offered a modicum of comfort as well as security.

Did the necrons possess a sense of smell?

Telion didn’t know, and wondered if that ought to have factored into their choice of position. Xenospecies didn’t think like humans, and the Imperium knew so little of this race. Telion’s greatest advantage was in his preternatural ability to anticipate how his enemy would think and react, but how could you plan to fight an enemy whose thoughts and desires were so utterly inimical to those of the living?

The other squad members were situated in mutually supporting positions, triangulated around the Techmarine working below them. Telion moved the magnoculars over each location.

Kysen and Vyell’s perch was in a sagging bell tower once used to summon the work shifts to the plating mill below, while Mokae and Nicada were located on the roof of an abandoned hab-block five hundred metres to the west. The workers were no longer in residence, and the building, much like the rest of the city, had an unnervingly desolate feel to it. Both teams were well concealed and highly disciplined, though Telion caught a hint of movement within the bell tower.

He tapped the vox-bead at his ear.

‘Vyell, I can see you,’ he said. ‘And if I can see you, someone else might see you.’

A double-click through the bead was all the acknowledgement Telion needed.

‘You know that’s wildly unlikely,’ said Kaetan, without taking his eye from his gunsight.

‘But not impossible,’ said Telion.

‘Any idea how long this is going to take?’

‘No. Arax says the blocker was completely burned out,’ said Telion, returning the sights of the magnoculars to where the red-armoured figure worked on the combined resonance blocker and hard-line relay that sought to hamper the enemy’s ability to teleport at will, while allowing the different barrack-stations of the local Militarum units to stay in contact.

From the onset of this campaign, comms had been lousy with interference, jamming and burn out. Nobody knew what was causing it – the rising, glyph-etched obelisks or just bad airspace.

Since half the city was burning, that was a distinct possibility.

The xenos assaults were sudden and shocking, wilfully destructive beyond what any of their predictive models had suggested. Fires burned throughout the city, for the most part confined to those areas that had already been evacuated to Anchorage Citadel or beyond the walled civilian enclaves still under Imperial control. A haze of fumes blanketed the city, lit with green lightning, which made spotting harder than Telion would have liked, but he’d trained these Scouts well, and they knew how to target-compensate for degraded atmospherics.

This was a fairly routine mission for the Scouts, insomuch as any mission into a hostile city where the enemy could appear from nowhere could be considered routine. Against a conventional foe, Telion would enter the field at least knowing the two most important pieces of information a warrior needed to triumph.

Where you are, and where the enemy is.

Something about this mission felt off, felt somehow more dangerous than it ought to be. He didn’t know why, and he didn’t like it. Telion didn’t consider himself to be a superstitious man, though he was given to touching the aquila on Quietus for luck and had trusted his instincts over intel more than a few times. He wasn’t given to flights of imagination, but the nagging suspicion he’d missed something was like an itch he just couldn’t scratch. More than a century in the field had taught Telion to respect that itch.

He touched the vox-bead again.

‘Techmarine Arax, do we have an estimate for completion?’

The bead crackled, and Telion swore he could hear the Techmarine sigh.

‘To repair a burned-out resonance array is no small task,’ said Arax. ‘It requires copious applications of cooling reagents, the replacement of numerous delicate components, and their consecration into the sacred trinity.’

‘And how long will said consecration take?’

‘As long as the Omnissiah wills,’ said Arax.

‘Might the Omnissiah be persuaded to expedite His will in this particular instance?’

‘Sergeant Telion, you of all people should understand the virtue of patience.’

Still watching through the magnoculars, Telion’s eyes narrowed as he caught a faint smudge in the air on the canted roof of a nearby munitions store. They’d discounted it as a sniper nest because the local Administratum records couldn’t guarantee it was empty of explosive ordnance and the current mission was time-sensitive.

‘Wait one,’ said Telion, cycling through the magnoculars’ visual filters: thermal, ultraviolet, sonic, auspex-enhanced. Nothing – but there was a blurred segment in the device’s viewfinder where it simply couldn’t represent what was in front of it.

‘Possible contact,’ he said over the vox, dropping to one knee and bringing Quietus around to his eye in one smooth motion. The weapon’s scope was fouled with the same distortion as the magnoculars. ‘Munitions factory roof, six hundred metres. South-west corner.’

Kaetan instantly swung his own rifle to bear. ‘I don’t see anything,’ he said. ‘Confirm?’

‘No visual,’ said Vyell in the bell tower.

‘No visual,’ came Nicada from the hab-block.

Telion dismounted the scope from the top of his rifle and laid it gently on the ground beside him. He reset his rifle and took aim down the iron sights. He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, but the hunter’s instincts that had kept him alive over the years insisted something was out of place.

He turned to Kaetan in time to see his helmet painted with a shimmering green haze.

‘Kae–’ was all he managed before the rear half of the sergeant’s helmet exploded.

The sizzling crack of energy discharge echoed a fraction of a second later. The Scout sergeant slumped over his weapon, the back of his helmet a sopping crater of pink brain matter and molten skull fragments.

Telion swung his rifle back around in time to see Arax collapse with his shattered helmet trailing flickering green flames. His servitors stood in mute incomprehension around his body.

Two kill shots in the space of a heartbeat.

There! On the roof of the munitions factory, the smudge in the air became real. A solitary, hunched figure of silver and bronze in a ragged black cloak. A grotesque, white-painted death mask beneath its hood.

Telion squeezed off two shots, the thing’s single, unblinking eye centred in his sights. Kysen and Mokae fired an instant later.

The shells covered the distance to their target in a fraction of a second.

But the enemy sniper was already gone, leaving only a swirl of emerald light in its wake.

‘Incoming.’

The warning came over the internal ship vox. Uriel’s head snapped in the direction of the cockpit. The speaker was Taysen, his voice coolly dispassionate. Uriel felt increased pressure on his limbs as the Techmarine pushed the engines out.

‘Nature?’ he asked.

‘Unknown at this point, but the auspex is lighting up with mass-signals.’

Uriel patched into Taysen’s helm feed, and what the pilot saw appeared in a translucent overlay on his visor. Port Setebos flashed past below him: burning warehouses, refineries and fabricatus hangars. Flickers of green lightning arced into the sky from the dark obelisks penetrating the bedrock throughout the city. Smoke filled the armaglass canopy, the avionics panels alight with waypoint vectors and data that was meaningless to Uriel.

‘Where am I looking?’ he asked.

‘All around us,’ said Taysen. ‘Rising up from the city.’

And then Uriel saw them.

He’d missed them in his initial scan, thinking the swirling dots were cinders and burning brands thrown up from the many conflagrations raging throughout the city. He snapped down through levels of magnification until he saw what looked like hundreds of rust-bronze insects with elongated bodies and illuminated green eyes.

A hooded head leaned out from what had until recently been a stowage compartment situated just behind the cockpit. His crimson robes were edged in a chequerboard pattern of black and white, and two cherry-red ocular implants blinked rapidly within a chimeric head of skin and steel.

Uriel had come to recognise that cadence of blinking as the adept displaying alarm.

‘Captain Ventris,’ said the tech-priest. ‘Adept Komeda is able to furnish you with an identification.’

‘Speak,’ demanded Uriel.

‘We of the Adeptus Mechanicus classify them as Autonomous Molecular Disassemblers, though Adept Komeda has heard some refer to them imprecisely as scarabs.’

‘Threat assessment?’

‘Essentially mindless feeder creatures that appear to generate an unknown form of disruptor field that compromises the intrinsic bonds of matter at the subatomic level.’

‘Captain Ventris,’ shouted Corporal Vivaro from the back of the gunship. ‘A pack of these scarabs reduced a Leman Russ Eradicator to scrap metal in less than a minute.’

The adept’s eyes blinked in irritation. ‘That is exactly what Adept Komeda said.’

‘Taysen, can you evade?’ asked Uriel.

‘Negative. Not laden like this.’

A Stormraven was normally a highly manoeuvrable gunship, its vectored thrusters making it a more agile fighter than the larger Thunderhawk, but with Brother Zethus still clamped to the craft, that asset was denied it.

‘Komeda,’ said Uriel. ‘Give me options.’

‘Adept Komeda advises disengaging the magnetic clamps securing the Dreadnought to this aircraft’s rear. Perhaps then–’

‘Not going to happen,’ said Uriel, cutting Komeda off as Taysen eased the nose down in a series of shallow dives to build up speed.

The adept’s eyes flickered as he consulted internal and noospheric databases.

‘Previous successful engagements with such creatures have been noted where they swarm and become vulnerable to large-scale ordnance. Given this gunship’s current loadout, and in lieu of such weapon systems, I would advise a flight path through as many flames as is possible.’

Uriel understood what that meant, and so too did Taysen.

‘Hold tight,’ said the Techmarine. ‘This flight is about to get very rough and very hot.’

Anchorage Citadel was the seat of power in Port Setebos, the first and greatest of the deep harbours built along the northern littoral. The port’s artificial bay cut deep into the land like a wide arrowhead, its inner wharfs gnarled with heavy industry: shipbuilding, fabricatus plants, promethium refineries, lading hangars and myriad other supporting infrastructure that enabled Port Setebos to function as the primary trade hub for Sycorax, both on and off-world. Twin palls hung over the port, one a literal layer of smoke from the many burning ruins throughout the city, the other more nebulous, yet no less toxic. Fear permeated the empty streets and abandoned structures of the once thriving port city, its populace either awaiting rescue or vanished without trace.

Anchorage Citadel reared like a blocky mountain at the apex of the arrowhead. Within its outer precincts, whole swathes of the population were housed in makeshift hab-shelters, tens of thousands of frightened civilians awaiting evacuation to the trans-oceanic cliff-hives. Many thousands more clustered around the outer faces of the citadel’s walls, awaiting their turn to be allowed entry, and unwilling to return to the densely packed hab-blocks where friends and neighbours were snatched away by the threat that had risen from the mudflats around Mount Shokereth.

Stationed within the killing ground between the citadel’s inner and outer precincts was the towering form of Lucius Pretorian, a Reaver-class Titan of Legio Astorum. Armoured in blue and gold plate and bearing tallied kill banners beneath each gun, its carapace heraldry proudly displayed the black eclipse of Forge World Lucius on a field of midnight blue. Deployed to Sycorax a century ago with Fabricatus Ubrique, it was a veteran engine of countless wars and served as a potent martial symbol of unity between Lucius and Sycorax.

The inner citadel proper was a grimly industrial edifice, all brutalist angles, flat geometric planes and exposed rockcrete and pipework. Its high, square towers were built as a drab, featureless grey, but were now crusted in swirling patterns of black salt and yellowed streaks of ocean-borne spray. Caustic winds from the dark waters snapped the House Nassaur flags and aquila banners atop the great cubic tower that served as grand palace for its twin-born governors and their planetary strategium. Its upper reaches were garlanded with freshly installed resonance blockers whose frequencies set the citadel’s inhabitant’s teeth on edge, and multi-phasic disruptors that gave the Tempestus Scions stationed on its walls blinding migraines after too long outside. A hardship, but a grimly necessary one to keep out an enemy that could teleport at will around the city.

At the heart of its thick walls of ocean-lashed stone was the heavily armoured dome of the Keep, a hot and gloomy chamber where the command-and-control infrastructure of an Imperial world could be monitored and directed. A thousand or more servitors lined the inward-curving wall in mezzanine-like tiers, hardwired to batteries of orbital augurs, Munitorum cogitators and aexactor logic-engines. Hooded Administratum adepts scurried to and fro, and dozens of Militarum staff runners moved between reporting stations bearing armfuls of data-slates and rolled-up maps, casualty lists and orders of battle.

The Royal Twins, Casimir and Alexia Nassaur, stood at a buzzing hololith table at the centre of the Keep and listened with growing concern to the latest briefings from their senior field commanders. Learchus Abantes, veteran sergeant of the Ultramarines, watched their reactions as the senior commanders delivered their reports. He was impressed by Alexia’s stoic demeanour in the face of ever-increasing bad news, and concerned at Casimir’s increasingly agitated responses. As an Astartes warrior, Learchus had been taught how to process information dispassionately, but mortals always seemed to find it difficult to detach from their emotions.

Alexia was the eldest of the twins, a tall woman who wore her years well – proudly regal and with an iron determination that had seen her weather capture by an ork warband, and the subsequent war to cleanse them, with aplomb. Her hair was black, streaked with cobalt blue to honour the Ultramarines, and subtle augmetics were worked just below the pale skin at her temple. She wore a loose-fitting bodyglove and the knee-length brown cloak that was ubiquitous to most inhabitants of Sycorax.

Her twin brother was a head taller and rail thin, his pinched features sharp and angular. His grey eyes were bright and attentive, darting over the glowing hololith displaying ill news from across the world. A smoking lho-stick clung to his bottom lip as always, and he took regular sips from a drink Learchus could tell was high-caff juiced with cognitive stimms. The man was running on adrenaline, but was at least self-aware enough to defer to his sister most of the time. These were trying times for Sycorax, and Learchus found himself sympathising with Casimir Nassaur, for he now knew how easy it was for rapidly changing times to strike at the very heart of you.

Learchus had always prided himself on his ability to let nothing unseat the rational processing of his mind, but recent events had shaken all his certainties to the core with body blows of ever greater consequence. The return of the primarch, the many assaults on Ultramar – of which this conflict on Sycorax was but the latest – and the ongoing Indomitus Crusade. The concept of duty was central to what made Learchus an outstanding veteran sergeant of the Ultramarines, and even as he recognised the honour Lord Guilliman had given the Fourth in entrusting them with his realm’s safety, the greater part of him still wished he was fighting alongside the primarch.

On top of that was the news that the Fourth’s captain had crossed the Rubicon Primaris. It amused Learchus to think of the youthful enmity that had once existed between him and Uriel Ventris, an enmity that had since turned to an unbreakable bond of loyalty and respect. Only a very few Primaris Marines had made it this far out in the galactic east, and so far Learchus was not impressed. Yes, each was bigger and stronger than their Astartes cousins, but they had not the experience nor the depth of brotherhood to be found in Space Marines who had stood shoulder to shoulder for centuries.

Learchus returned his focus to the command briefing as a Militarum general named Gurenti delivered word that his regiment was being ordered off-world to face a growing threat in Ultramar’s northern marches. A heated back and forth ensued, resulting in nothing but platitudes and regrets, before the briefing moved on to Fabricatus Ubrique.

The senior representative of the Adeptus Mechanicus hailed from the forge world of Lucius, and delivered her report in dry tones, full of statistics enumerating the efforts her adepts had taken in conjunction with the Techmarines of the Ultramarines to curtail the necron’s teleportation capabilities. Learchus listened with only half an ear, allowing his primary cognitive functions to concentrate on his data-slate, which displayed the Fourth Company assets deployed to Sycorax.

Four squads: three tactical, one scout.

A third of the company, a potent force by any measure, but one that felt under-strength for the current situation. All across Sycorax, the necrons had been assaulting population centres in ever-increasing numbers, overwhelming each city’s defenders and teleporting out before consolidating any territorial gains. In their wake, cities were left empty, ghost metropolises of glowing black spires, and where the numbers of dead fell short of what census data indicated were pre-war levels.

What are they doing?

The silence following his thought told Learchus that he’d spoken aloud.

‘You have something to add to my report, Sergeant Learchus?’ asked Fabricatus Ubrique. Her augmitter was still scratchy and crackled with static. A greenskin had all but crushed her throat many years ago, and though the half-porcelain mask covering the left side of her face had been repaired and upgraded since then, the augmentations had only partially restored her vocal range.

Clad in the cream and dark metal of the Lucius forge world, her robes were edged in the red of the Martian priesthood, and were hemmed and cuffed with a dogtooth pattern of gold to honour the world upon which she was currently stationed. The icon of a skull-stamped ‘L’ across a caged star was pinned to her breast, formed from a unique metal known as luciun. A wheezing servo-harness of gold hissed and clattered at her back, and held suspended above her head within a crackling web of yellow light was a gently rotating sun-globe of circuit-etched gold.

Ubrique turned to him, and a waving mechadendrite with an unblinking picter clicked as it captured his image. The magos was an inveterate chronicler of visual imagery, and every wall of the utilitarian wing of the citadel given over to the Adeptus Mechanicus was hung with her many captures.

‘Apologies,’ said Learchus with a short bow. ‘I was just thinking aloud. Please, continue.’

Ubrique waved a mechadendrite and said, ‘I have said all I need to say, sergeant, but I would be interested in what you have to share with your fellow commanders.’

Learchus shook his head. ‘Thank you, fabricatus, but as of ninety-three minutes ago, Captain Ventris now commands the Fourth Company forces in this theatre.’

‘Captain Ventris?’ said Alexia Nassaur. ‘He’s here? On Sycorax?’

‘Yes,’ said Learchus. ‘He deployed into action directly from the strike cruiser Vae Victus, aboard the Stormraven Illyrium Lux.’

‘There’s an Adeptus Astartes vessel in orbit and we’re just learning of it now?’ spluttered Casimir Nassaur.

‘We Ultramarines do not typically make a habit of announcing our arrival in orbit,’ said Learchus. ‘But our vessel’s arrival with Captain Ventris was to form the crux of my briefing.’

‘Why is Captain Ventris not here in Anchorage Citadel?’ asked Casimir.

‘As I said, he is in the field,’ said Learchus. ‘Conducting an operation to eliminate a high-value enemy target.’

‘What high-value enemy target?’ asked Gurenti.

‘A necron war-leader. One whose appearance often heralds significant military operations. Your own Militarum strategos name it a Tier Silver commander, Mechanicus Analyticae designate it Control Node Beta four-five-four-A. Ultramarines Vanguard forces encountered a similar being in the Vidar Sector. This target on Sycorax possesses enough points of congruity for us to believe it is a comparable theta-level threat with significant command-and-control capabilities. Captain Ventris believes, and I concur, that eliminating this target will greatly disrupt the enemy’s plans.’

‘There is an order of battle,’ said General Gurenti. ‘The Adeptus Astartes, exalted as they are, should not consider themselves exempt from that.’

‘We do not,’ Learchus assured him.

‘Then where exactly is Captain Ventris?’ asked Alexia Nassaur.

‘Telemetry data indicates he is en route to Anchorage Citadel even as we speak.’

Elia held fast to the nearest stanchion as the gunship throttled back. It dipped its starboard wing in a hard, stooped turn. The shrieking pitch of the engines dropped away. She felt a sudden weightlessness in the instant before the pilot punched the engines out. Her body slammed against the fuselage, the breath was driven from her chest. Her head slammed against the stanchion, and she heard her helmet crack.

Pressed into her, Vartan gripped the metal grille of the stowage bench with white knuckles. She remembered him telling her he hated atmospheric drops more than anything.

Her guts dropped away as the gunship spiralled down at an angle so steep it would surely only be moments before they smashed into the ground. Her vision greyed at the edges and she took a series of short, sharp breaths of suddenly hot air. At the front of the gunship, the Space Marines all sat looking straight ahead. Like this wasn’t a life-or-death moment for them all. How could they possibly stay calm at a time like this?

Is it because they know they can survive a crash in their giant suits of armour?

Her own flak jacket looked pretty pitiful right now, and looking over at Kyra and Vigo, it was clear they thought the same. Their juddering, sweat-streaked faces looked terrified. Kyra clutched her recovered vox-caster like it was some kind of protection. Vigo held tight to his grenade launcher with much the same intent.

The gunship sawed violently around, its metal frame groaning under the pressure of its erratic manoeuvres. She had no idea what was happening outside. Heavy clangs punched the skin of the gunship, like someone was beating it with steel bars. They came from all around, above her, behind her and below. The hull boomed with impacts and Elia heard an awful grinding noise, like you heard in the salvage yards when a wrecked Chimera was being cut open for parts. Hot, suffocating heat filled the compartment, the taste of ash and smoke.

‘What in the Emperor’s name?’ cried Vigo, staring in horror at the metalled floor.

Half a dozen pools of cherry-red heat pulsed all across the deck, the metal plates losing solidity as whatever was outside began burning through the gunship’s armour. She moved her booted feet as the metal below her soles softened, and a hideously familiar green light seeped into the compartment.

Steel plates churned as chisel-like mandibles chewed through the hull. Beside her, Commissar Vartan drew his bolt pistol and fired into the floor. Elia heard a grating screech as the shell blasted whatever was on the other side clear.

More of the heat-softened patches appeared on the fuselage. More impacts, more heat-patches as alien energies tore into the gunship. Elia lost track of how many there were. She tried to draw her pistol, but the wild bucking motion of the aircraft rendered any coordination of her arms useless.

Heat bloomed at her back, and Elia twisted her head to see a swirling patch of red-green light on the fuselage behind her. Churning teeth spun in the mass of liquefying metal.

‘Elia! Move!’ shouted Kyra, and she looked up to see the company vox-officer aiming her pistol. The barrel waved crazily in the air.

Surely she didn’t mean to…?

‘No! Wait, you can’t–’

A blast of las seared the air at her left cheek, raising a painful weal on her skin. The shot punched through the bulkhead, taking whatever was on the other side with it.

‘Imperator!’ cried Elia as the gunship spiralled lower and lower.

A portion of the ventral hull dissolved completely. Flames and a pack of the grotesquely insectile silver machines swarmed inside. Four more flew in through burrowed holes in the gunship’s flanks, clicking mandibles spinning and drooling lambent green light. Searing winds howled into the Stormraven, together with the stink of molten metal.

Thunderous booms of mass-reactives from the Astartes’ guns exploded every one of them. Elia saw a rotating kaleidoscope of sky and ground through the torn fuselage, buildings and fire flipping every second. Even over the wild pitches and yaws, she saw the gunship’s wings were thick with the gnawing drone creatures. Billowing flames peeled dozens of them off, but more swarmed the gunship every second.

How is this thing still flying?

She saw tall structures passing terrifyingly close, gantries and towers with painted walls so close she could have read the Mechanicus alphanumerics on their sides. Explosions surrounded the gunship. Green light and thick clouds of choking black smoke engulfed her.

Was that from the gunship or the city around them?

More gunshots filled the compartment as the Space Marines expertly picked off the swarming drone-creatures as soon as any gained entry. The noise was deafening. Hard bangs, screeching machine deaths, spinning metal.

A bright white explosion beyond the fuselage told Elia one of the engines had detonated. A heartbeat later, the fuselage behind her peeled back like the foil lid of a ration pack. Elia had a fraction of a second to see Vartan’s terrified face as he was torn from the gunship. She couldn’t save him from falling, but reached out anyway.

The juddering flight couldn’t continue, and the gunship finally plunged towards the ground. Half of the bolts holding her seat in place sheared away, and Elia screamed as the force of the gunship’s descent pulled the seating mount from the deck. She saw how low they were, how fast. The ground flashed past in a blur of insane speed.

Then she was in the air. Twisting. Falling…

A blue-gauntleted hand grabbed her chest webbing, clenched painfully hard and held. She locked eyes with Captain Ventris, knowing they could not survive the coming crash.

The gunship arced down, both wings sheared away, the pilot fighting to hold them level.

Elia closed her eyes and prayed to the Divine Master of Mankind.

And her world burst apart in a crescendo of blinding light and the deafening thunder of a ferocious impact.

4

His world was pulsing red light, toxic smoke and fire. Buckled metal groaned, blackening and twisting in the killing heat.

Pain flared and Uriel’s visor flickered, the display glitching. His right eye-lens was splintered with a spiderweb of cracks. Warning sigils, heat blooms, power spikes and compression failures flickered before him.

Six seconds since the crash. His body battered, but already recovering.

Bio-indicators fizzed at the top of his remaining eye-lens, life signs from his warriors. All still alive, but none moving. Impact trauma keeping them immobile for now. He tried to rise, but something hard and unyielding pinned him in place. Mass that was slowly crushing him. A serial number was etched into the metal under flaking paint.

Aft-quarter hull plate and dorsal keel. Likely an engine block above.

Points of pressure registered on his armour, paired with arcs of leverage. Uriel closed his eyes and felt the biological furnace at his heart roar to life. His newly strengthened bones tightened inside his flesh, the sensation novel and painful – his skeletal mass now thrumming with power like he’d never known. His armour responded, the Gravis plate precisely reacting in concert with his musculature.

He pushed up: precisely vectored force to move the giant weight above him. His arms were locked at the elbows, forming a void beneath him in which was sheltered the motionless form of Elia Vivaro. Uriel lifted the wreck of the Stormraven enough to get one leg under him, bent his knee and pushed up. The gunship’s hull screeched, bare metal weighed down by tons of rubble.

The debris above him shifted.

Lines of force changed, increasing exponentially and becoming too heavy to hold. The entire mass of the gunship and whatever building they’d hit now rested on his shoulders. Uriel locked his legs as a powerful heat built in his enhanced muscles. The flames of ignited jet fuel were intense, burning at a temperature Uriel could feel through his armour.

Gritting his teeth, he scooped the woman up in one arm and cradled her close to his chest. In the instant before the crash, he’d tried to enclose her in a protective cage of his arms and body, but couldn’t yet tell if she was still alive. Blood matted her face and hair; scorched skin was visible where her uniform had burned away.

Twisting his other leg, Uriel pushed up again, hearing the screech of metal along his armour’s hissing power pack. The bio-signs in his visor began to twitch. He heard voices over the crackle of flames, vox-units connecting one by one.

Pain built in the small of his back. His legs began to shake.

‘Give her to me!’ said Pasanius, emerging from the smoke. His friend’s armour looked like an Ironclad had worked it over, every plate buckled beyond recognition. Uriel gratefully passed Vivaro to Pasanius, who lifted her away and propped her up against a canted roof slab.

‘Hurry!’ snapped Uriel. ‘I can’t hold this much longer! Get Zethus to lift this off!’

‘Zethus isn’t here,’ said Pasanius, running back to him.

‘What?’

‘He must have been torn loose from the Stormraven somewhere before impact.’ Pasanius scanned the wreck, gauging where to lend his strength.

‘There!’ said Uriel, nodding to where the drive section of the engine was pressing down.

The veteran sergeant took the weight on his shoulders and pushed, grunting with the effort as the Swords of Calth pulled themselves from the wreckage. In moments, all five were clear of the burning, crushing interior.

‘Militarum?’ asked Uriel through gritted teeth.

‘Getting them out now,’ said Petronius Nero, wreathed in flames as he dragged two mortal bodies from within what was left of the troop compartment. ‘I think one of them is dead.’

‘Hurry, Peto!’ said Pasanius. ‘Can’t. Hold. This…’

‘Clear!’ said Nero, scrambling out from within.

‘Release on my mark,’ said Uriel.

Pasanius only nodded.

‘Mark!’ said Uriel, and the two of them released their grip to surge forward. The burning metal of the gunship crumpled inwards as a crashing avalanche of debris swallowed it, burying it beneath tons of metal and masonry. Dust billowed in a grey cloud.

Uriel released a pent-up breath, feeling the painful constriction of the sinew coils around his bones release and the fire in his heart ease. His breath came in short, sharp hikes, only gradually slowing to something approaching normal. Every muscle in his body flared with pulsing aftershocks of effort, the sense of power ebbing like a receding tide. It left a cold, iron taste in his mouth, a sense of invincibility given away.

Uriel blinked through a haze of painful brightness, turning from the lost Stormraven. It had come down at the edge of what appeared to be a manufactory assemblage yard, a place where workers would gather to hear the daily sermons and blessings before their labour-shifts, and buried itself in the outworks of a steel mill.

The yard was perhaps two hundred metres long, and half that wide, and the burning gouge the Stormraven had torn was a deep trench in the earth. That Taysen had managed to bring them down in what was as close to an open space as could be found within Port Setebos was nothing short of a miracle. The grey ruins were black with fire smoke, and Uriel could trace the barely controlled descent of the Stormraven in the succession of demolished walls in the opposite structure. Likely Zethus was out there somewhere, but his icon didn’t appear on Uriel’s visor. A damaged transponder, interference or something worse? Uriel didn’t know.

Fires burned in all directions, and the green-tinted air had the thick, industrial texture of hydrocarbons in every breath. Nothing to trouble Astartes physiology, but prolonged exposure would certainly be toxic to a mortal respiratory system.

Uriel tuned his helm-vox into the local command net.

‘Anchorage Citadel, this is Company Actual.’

The bead in his ear crackled with warbling static, like a distant ocean.

‘Anchorage Citadel, I repeat, this is Company Actual. Respond.’

More static. He switched through various vox-nets. If he could link with another Imperial force he could at least get word to Learchus to send an extraction force. But there was nothing – no voices, no signifiers of any friendly forces, just a rasping, metallic sound, like a whetstone over steel, he couldn’t identify.

‘Damn it,’ sighed Uriel. ‘So where are we?’

In response, a blurred topographical overlay appeared in his visor, a flickering vector diagram laced with static as his internal systems attempted to fix his position through the distorting haze of resonance blockers. His armour couldn’t fix his position, alternately putting him far to the east of the city, high on its northern hills or in the middle of the water. As best he could guess, given the gunship’s flight path and time in the air, they were somewhere in the north-eastern hab-districts, meaning a journey of, say, twenty-three kilometres south by south-west would bring them to the gates of Anchorage Citadel.

‘Swords of Calth, we need to get moving,’ said Uriel. ‘Status and readiness.’

Livius Hadrianus answered first. ‘Most of the reserve melta charges cooked off in the crash. Got a full charge in the weapon, two spare. Enough to take down a few heavy armours, but don’t ask for much more than that.’

‘Cyprian?’

‘All good, captain,’ said the bulky Space Marine, flexing a damaged elbow joint. ‘Like Livius, I’m low on ammo. Just my basic loadout. Six magazines and my blade.’

‘Then make every shot count,’ said Uriel. ‘Nero?’

Petronius Nero looked up from where he was now attempting to bend his shield back into shape. Uriel could see it was a thankless task; the shield’s forearm grip had been sheared off and the power field generator was smashed.

‘Thankfully my sword and pistol survived, but the shield is useless,’ he said, wrapping it in a scrap of canvas that hung from a bent length of rebar.

‘Then what are you doing?’ asked Hadrianus, as Nero slung the useless shield over his back and secured it with the red sash he untied from around his waist. ‘I thought you said it was useless?’

‘This shield is a part of me,’ said Nero. ‘I would sooner leave you behind than abandon it.’

‘He’s got a point,’ said Cyprian.

Hadrianus nodded. ‘I understand, but think how much you’d all miss my covering fire. What about Zethus? I don’t see his icon.’

‘The clamps securing him must have failed in our descent,’ said Uriel. ‘We shook him loose, but if anyone can make it back alone, it is Brother Zethus.’

‘He’ll just bludgeon a path to Anchorage,’ said Cyprian with a sage nod.

Uriel nodded and turned to Apothecary Selenus, who knelt beside Taysen. The golden eagle on the Techmarine’s chest was splintered and red with fresh blood, his face waxen with pain. All that held him upright was the last remaining mechadendrite on his servo-harness.

‘Apothecary?’

Selenus lifted his hand, but didn’t turn from his work on Taysen’s leg.

‘I’m optimal, captain, but Taysen’s legs are broken in a dozen places, and his lungs are burned internally,’ said Selenus. ‘And thanks to shrapnel from the Stormraven’s avionics panel, his primary heart is functionally non-existent.’

‘I can walk… I can fight,’ insisted Taysen, each word forced, his breath wheezing through backup respiratory organs as his blood flow equalised under pressure from his secondary heart.

‘You’ll have to,’ said Uriel, scanning the endless expanse of dust-hazed ruins and collapsed structures surrounding them. ‘I can’t raise Anchorage Citadel for aerial extraction, and I do not imagine a Rhino could get this deep in the city.’

‘What about your Land Raider?’ asked Cyprian, nodding towards Pasanius.

‘I’ve tried to raise Heart of Stone, but I’m not getting anything except something that sounds like groaning steel,’ said Pasanius.

Uriel nodded and turned to the last member of his command squad, and said, ‘Ancient?’

Ancient Peleus knelt by the ruined Stormraven, fists clenched at his side. In his left hand, he held his bolt pistol, in his right a colourful scrap of smouldering cloth. It took Uriel a moment to recognise it for what it was, as his mind simply couldn’t accept the reality of what he was seeing.

‘I… I lost the banner,’ said Peleus, his voice hoarse with shame.

The Ultramarines gathered around Peleus as he held out all that was left of the Fourth Company banner. Its upper section was still largely intact, depicting the company number and the star field upon which the tips of the ivory ultima were stitched in silver thread. From the victory laurels and mailed fist down, all that remained were torn strips of stiffened fabric and fragments of imagery – scrollwork, a tyrannic skull, a Calthian Sunburst. Centuries of hard-fought honour, glorious campaigns and victories were gone, every battle of legend burned away: Thracia, Tarsis Ultra, Pavonis, Ichar IV, Espandor, Armageddon, Calth, Varantus Prime and dozens more, all taken by the fire of the gunship’s crash and the superheated melta charges.

Uriel felt as though a frozen dagger had been thrust deep into his heart at the sight of the scorched cloth. He had fought beneath the banner of the Fourth his entire life, had followed it into the crucible of combat, and shed his blood in its defence. The Ultima Quatro symbolised the heart and soul of Uriel’s company, commemorated its victories and remembered those who had fought and died to do it honour. To Astartes warriors whose legacy was bound up in the weave of this relic of the Chapter, seeing it burned like this was as great a pain as losing a trusted battle-brother.

‘The fault is not yours,’ said Uriel. ‘I am the Fourth’s captain. The responsibility is mine.’

Peleus shook his head. ‘I swore an oath to protect it with my life, and now it is lost.’

One after another, the Swords of Calth placed a gauntlet on Peleus: on his shoulder guards, on his backpack, and the engraved pauldron that marked him as the Company Ancient.

‘Lost, but not taken,’ said Uriel. ‘The banner is burned, aye, but we will remake it. None of us will forget the laurels we and those who came before us won. When this campaign is ended, we will restore the banner upon our return to Macragge. This I swear to you, Peleus, you will bear a banner proudly before us again.’

They came singly, moving through the shadows to regroup.

Telion had been first to arrive, and he was pleased that all four managed to reach the rally point unobserved. Well, mostly unobserved. There wasn’t yet a Scout good enough to evade Torias Telion’s eye. Kaetan had taught them well, imparting knowledge he and Telion had accumulated in over a century of moving through hidden spaces to bring death to the Emperor’s enemies.

Telion waited in the lee of an atmospheric processing unit on the roof of a hollowed-out hab-tower the Ultramarines’ cartographae liaison had designated S-H42-83. The letters represented Structure-Habitat, and the 42-83 represented the building’s location on a regularly updated overlay grid. The most important fact any commander needed in an active warzone was to know where they were. Everything else was secondary to that central understanding. It was the first thing Telion taught, the first thing Kaetan drummed into aspirants who trained in the Scout company in the years before their elevation to the battle companies.

Telion had taught Kaetan, and he was the best he’d ever trained.

His loss was a devastating blow to the Chapter. So much knowledge and experience had died with him, and Telion could think of only a handful of men he’d trained who even came close to Kaetan’s level. How many times had they stalked their enemies through ice and desert, city and the void? To survive behind enemy lines broke all barriers between warriors. No secrets were possible, no hidden vulnerabilities, no vanity. The bond between Space Marines who’d shared serious time in the Scouts was like no other, and Kaetan had been more than just a battle-brother or fellow Scout.

He had been Telion’s friend.

‘I miss you, brother,’ whispered Telion, fighting against an almost overwhelming surge of grief. He’d lost warriors in the field before, too many to count, but he’d made the mistake of thinking Kaetan was untouchable, a man of such peerless craft that surely there was no opponent skilful enough to take him down.

Foolish and hubristic, of course. The years spent mourning fallen warriors explicitly taught that no one was immortal, and yet he had assumed their skills would keep them alive for as long as they could still serve the Chapter.

‘We are none of us immortal,’ he whispered.

‘Except the great Torias Telion,’ said Nicada, from a mezzanine above.

Telion hid his surprise. He hadn’t seen or heard Nicada’s final approach, which should have pleased him, but only served to underscore his anger and grief.

‘Sergeant Kaetan said something similar to me on Quintarn,’ he said. ‘He was wrong then, and if today should teach you anything, it’s the rank stupidity of words like that.’

‘Apologies, sergeant,’ said Nicada, swinging down from the mezzanine and somehow managing to land on the hard slab floor without making a sound.

The boy was good, and Telion let out a breath to detach his personal emotions from the moment, putting aside his introspections to be the Torias Telion the Scout needed him to be.

‘You took your time,’ he said.

‘I’m the first one here.’

‘Aye, that you are, lad, but at what cost?’

‘Cost?’

‘You were too damn eager crossing the pipe-run from the grain silo,’ said Telion. ‘Your camo-cloak caught on a tie-bolt and exposed your weapon. I saw the glint of its metal.’

‘I knew it was a risk,’ replied Nicada, accepting the critique. ‘I hoped the reward of a speedier crossing to lessen my exposure time would offset the danger of being in the open.’

‘Moving through hostile terrain is always a risk-reward trade-off,’ agreed Telion. ‘But against this enemy, we’re going to have to err more on the side of caution.’

Kysen was next to arrive. Telion had spotted him moving through a shattered culvert, using the falling water to cover his movement, but, like Nicada, he’d been too eager, his forward motion in opposition to the water flooding from the pipe. Vyell and Mokae reached the rally point next, and Telion took a moment to offer his thoughts on each of their advances.

He saw their shared grief, the youthful belief in their own invincibility shattered by Kaetan’s death. He understood it, and knew he had to acknowledge their loss while bolstering their courage at this vulnerable moment. A Scout who lost confidence was a dead Scout.

He made the sign to take a knee, and the four Scouts formed up around him. They were shockingly young, no service studs and no scars. Their features hadn’t yet bulked with the final transformation into a line warrior of the Adeptus Astartes.

Was I ever that young?

No, I was carved from granite and born with a sniper rifle in hand.

‘We lost a brother today,’ he said. ‘A friend and a mentor. Sergeant Altyr Kaetan was my friend for over a century. There wasn’t a damn thing we hadn’t done behind enemy lines. We took out the Bloodborn forges of Votheer Tark, put the rebels of Trenor to flight, uncovered the greenskin submersible base at Black Reach for Captain Sicarius to swoop in and destroy. We did all that and more, and Sergeant Kaetan was the best of us. But he died.’

Telion paused to look each of Kaetan’s Scouts in the eye.

‘Do you know why he died?’

None of them had an answer until Nicada spoke up. ‘Because the necrons have technology and weaponry we don’t understand?’

‘That they do, boy, but since when do we give a rat’s fart about the enemy’s weaponry?’

‘We must have missed something,’ said Vyell.

‘We didn’t,’ Telion assured him.

‘Did we wait too long before displacing?’ asked Mokae.

Telion shook his head, his chest tight with emotion he couldn’t show. ‘Kaetan died because that’s what happens in war. You can do everything right and still die. The sooner you all accept that, the better Scouts you’ll be.’

He could feel his anger building at the sheer, bloody unfairness of it all, and wanted to laugh despairingly that he had ever believed in notions of fairness or justice in war.

‘You can be the best shot, the best blade-killer, the best at moving silently and you can still die. You can stand at the top of the mountain, the greatest warrior of the age, and still war can cut you down without warning. But Emperor damn it, Kaetan taught you all well enough that you’re going to make it bloody hard for death to take any of you.’

He paused to take a shuddering breath. He was Torias Telion, the stone-faced, silent killer. He didn’t make speeches and he didn’t lose his composure. He clamped down on his rage.

‘The thing that killed Sergeant Kaetan… What even is it?’ asked Nicada. ‘I’ve heard rumours of necron stealth killers, but never encountered one. Have you ever seen anything like it before?’

Telion nodded. ‘Once. On Damnos. We called it the Death-mark.’

‘Why?’ asked Mokae.

‘On account of the green shimmer witnesses reported around the heads of its victims, right before the kill-shot.’

‘And you think that’s what we saw here?’ said Kysen eagerly.

‘I think so, aye. Just before he was hit, I saw that same damnable mark over Sergeant Kaetan’s helmet,’ said Telion, but before he could say more, the bead in his ear chirruped.

He checked the chron, seeing they were well outside the regular window for comms with Anchorage Citadel.

Command net vox-prefix: Learchus.

Unscheduled comms with a senior commander never boded well. He tapped the vox-bead.

‘Anchorage Actual, you’re out of the secure window,’ said Telion.

‘Acknowledged, Broadsword Lead. I would not be contacting you if it was not important.’ The voice was scratchy and warbling through the static and interference blanketing the city, but Telion still heard the patrician stiffness of Learchus’ voice.

‘Go ahead, but be quick.’

‘Be advised that Company Actual is in the field.’

Telion was taken aback. Company Actual was Uriel Ventris, and the last Telion had heard, the captain was far from Sycorax with Lord Guilliman on the Indomitus Crusade.

‘Say again, Anchorage,’ said Telion. ‘Company Actual is in the field? Here?’

‘Confirmed,’ said Learchus. ‘As of one hundred minutes ago, Anchorage Citadel lost contact with the Stormraven Illyrium Lux, and surveyors are picking up signs of a crash in the northern sectors of the city, though we have been unable to establish communications with Company Actual. I am sending you the coordinates now.’

Data inloads streamed across the forearm slate worked into Telion’s armour.

‘Kaetan’s dead,’ said Telion. ‘Arax too. A necron sniper got them both.’

The pause between Learchus’ next words was fractional, but spoke volumes.

‘Acknowledged, but all other concerns are superseded,’ said Learchus. ‘Make all speed to the crash site and escort Company Actual back to Anchorage Citadel.’

‘If they survived the crash, those warriors can handle themselves,’ said Telion.

‘True, but irrelevant,’ replied Learchus. ‘You have your orders, Sergeant Telion.’

‘We are engaged with a priority target,’ insisted Telion. ‘One that poses a significant danger to all command rank individuals. There is clear strategic advantage to its death.’

‘Broadsword, your orders are to–’

Telion shut off the vox and turned to his Scouts. They’d only heard one side of the conversation, but it wasn’t hard to gauge the other.

‘So we’re going after the necron sniper?’ said Kysen.

‘No, lad, I am,’ said Telion. ‘You are heading back to the Anchorage. No sense in having Learchus slap Codex Infractions on all of us.’

Kysen shook his head. ‘With all due respect, sergeant, you’re going to need extra eyes on target to take this sniper out.’

‘Or extra overwatch to flush him out for a kill-shot,’ added Nicada.

‘For Kaetan,’ said Vyell.

‘For Arax,’ added Mokae.

Telion kept his face neutral, seeing echoes of Kaetan in each Scout’s face: his loyalty, his strength and his absolute professionalism. Besides, they were right; hunting a sniper like this would be easier with more assets in the field.

He shook his head. ‘You’re a credit to the Chapter, lads, and you make my old heart swell with pride, but that’s not how this works. You’re not ready to take on a foe like this. Damn it all, I’m not even sure I am. As it is, Learchus will have my head on a platter for disobeying a direct order, so I won’t have your futures sullied by tying yourselves to this soon-to-be disciplined relic.’

‘Sergeant–’ began Nicada, but Telion held up his hand in the go silent sign.

‘I won’t be argued with,’ he said. ‘You’re to regroup at Anchorage, understood?’

They nodded and Telion felt their disappointment keenly.

‘Sergeant?’ asked Kysen.

‘Yes, lad?’

‘How did you kill the Deathmark on Damnos?’

Telion sighed and racked the slide of his Stalker-pattern bolter.

‘We didn’t,’ he said. ‘But I’m damn sure I’m going to kill this one.’

Book II

ANABASIS

‘We are less than cattle to these beings, chattel to be cast aside, consumed or made sport with for their pleasure. There is not one amongst them that would pay heed to a world of mortals any more than I would an ant upon my boot.’

– Inquisitor Kessel at the Conclave of Eidolon

5

Uriel held still on the slope of rubble within the ruined hab-block. Lying on his belly next to Pasanius, he peered through a twisted lattice of girders at the buzzing pack of scarabs swarming around a pair of fallen promethium silos. A hundred metres distant, their hardened sides had split open on impact with the ground, and burning slicks of fuel poured towards the bay in a wide river of fire and impenetrable smoke.

‘Do you think they can track us here?’ said Pasanius. He kept his words to a whisper, as if the scarabs might hear them.

‘If they could, they would already be upon us,’ said Uriel.

The scarabs twisted in the air over the silo, as if eager to prove him wrong. Uriel held his breath, slowing his heart rate, but the scarab swarm turned and flew back to the west.

He turned from the hole in the outer wall, letting out a relieved breath.

‘So much for a route through the riverine fabricatus yards,’ said Pasanius.

‘The fumes will make breathing rank and unpleasant,’ agreed Uriel, ‘but our armour ought to be proof against the flames.’

Pasanius shifted his weight and looked at Uriel.

‘We might be able to get through there, but aren’t you forgetting about the Militarum soldiers? They’d never survive that route.’

‘Is that our primary concern right now?’

‘I’m not sure I understand what you’re suggesting. At least, I hope I don’t.’

‘One of those human soldiers will likely be dead soon,’ said Uriel. ‘And the odds of the others surviving to reach Anchorage Citadel are low.’

‘What are you saying? That we just abandon them?’

‘Without them, we could regroup with the Fourth before nightfall.’

Pasanius put a dusty hand on Uriel’s pauldron.

‘I’ve heard it said a warrior comes back changed from crossing the Rubicon Primaris,’ said Pasanius, ‘but I can’t believe Uriel Ventris would come back so changed that he’d be ready to abandon his allies.’

‘I do not wish to, but it is the only logical option,’ said Uriel. ‘You know it is. The longer we are out here, the more likely it is the necrons will locate us and attack in overwhelming force. It is only thanks to Adept Komeda’s skills in binaric obfuscation they have not already found us.’

‘So we just leave fellow Imperial soldiers to die, is that it?’

‘They are not Astartes, only–’

‘Only what?’ interrupted Pasanius. ‘Only mortals?’

‘That is not what I was going to say.’

‘Then what were you going to say?’

‘They are only three lives, weighed against the possibility of losing seven Ultramarines. Even their own Militarum strategos would not consider that an acceptable calculation.’

Pasanius removed his helmet and placed it on the rubble beside him. Dust caked his skin, and his eyes were bloodshot. His face was streaked in sweat, the lines in his face deeper and more careworn than Uriel remembered.

‘If they’re only mortals, then why risk your life to save Corporal Vivaro when we were about to crash?’ asked Pasanius.

Uriel shrugged. ‘I acted on instinct.’

‘Then hold to that instinct,’ said Pasanius. ‘Or you are not the man I followed into the Eye of Terror, not the man at whose side I have fought since our days at Agiselus.’

Anger touched Uriel, but he pushed it down, detaching his psyche from the combat stimm-boosters welling in his bloodstream. He took a series of long breaths and nodded, knowing Pasanius was right and pushing down the imperatives hardening his thoughts.

‘I apologise, my friend,’ he said. ‘You are right – the Rubicon has made me more powerful. I am stronger, faster and tougher. I think faster too, but the cost of that is terrible, cold logic that seeks to expunge weakness wherever I see it.’

‘Weakness? You think those soldiers are weak?’ said Pasanius.

‘Compared to us, they are.’

‘Compared to you, I am weak. Does your cold logic apply to me? To the Swords?’

‘Of course not,’ said Uriel, aghast. ‘You are my brother Astartes!’

‘For now,’ said Pasanius. ‘But how long will it be until the Primaris brethren outnumber the existing Space Marines? What happens then?’

Uriel had no answer for him, but his friend wasn’t yet done.

‘You and I have fought the worst horrors of this galaxy, clad in the finest armour and armed with the deadliest weapons,’ said Pasanius. ‘They go into battle with nothing more than mass-produced armaplas and a lasgun. We are trained to overcome fear, but they have to fight and overcome every instinct for self-preservation to march into the fires of war. That’s courage. And we don’t abandon courage.’

Uriel nodded, and together they scrambled down the rubble slopes to the level below, where the rest of their ragtag group of survivors awaited.

The hab-block in which they sheltered had lost its upper ten floors when a neighbouring structure had come down like a blade and sheared them away. Beyond its fourth level, rusted girders bent to the sky like bronzed wire, and brackish water spilled down its eastern flank in a giant waterfall. Uriel and the Swords of Calth had taken refuge in the structure’s second level, high enough to afford them a tactically useful view over the city’s environs, low enough to the ground to afford easy escape routes to the streets.

Three hours had passed since they’d left the wreckage of the Stormraven. Three hours of backtracking, and waiting out drifting swarms of scarabs, of traversing rubble-filled routes through a devastated city that reeked of petrochemical fumes and where the atmosphere had a strange, actinic flavour that tasted of charged metal. Creeping along roadways filled with the hanging dust and fallen debris of ruined structures. Past incongruous, rune-scored obelisks of dully reflective alien materials that Mechanicus reports said were climbing higher every day, and which pulsed with a subsonic vibration felt deep in the marrow. Port Setebos was a city in the grip of a strange and eldritch transformation.

For now, the command squad was hunkered down in the remains of the communal space at the heart of the hab-block, an open area filled with the packed-up belongings of civilians who hadn’t made it out. Suitcases, trunks and Militarum kitbags were ordered in neat piles, the personal effects of people who hoped that they might soon return. Uriel saw no signs of panic or fighting, as though the missing people had been peacefully awaiting evacuation and had simply vanished in an instant.

The Swords of Calth had used their time wisely in this pause, tallying ammunition and spreading mass-reactives evenly around their group. Still, each warrior bore only enough for a few engagements, and beyond any immediate necessity, they would likely have to fight their way out with blades and fists. Together the Space Marines formed a loose perimeter, covering the major points of ingress to the collapsed structure, with Brutus Cyprian maintaining a position on the ground floor among the block’s debris-choked loading bays.

Even Taysen maintained a watch position, propped up by a loophole his servo-arm had punched through the wall to allow him to monitor the eastern approach. The Techmarine was in constant, dull agony from his broken legs and ruptured lungs, but he was a warrior of the Ultramarines and was fighting to be useful with every tortured breath.

At the centre of the communal space, Corporal Elia Vivaro stood over a laminated map with one of her fellow troopers, a vox-operator named Kyra Vance, and Adept Komeda. A holographic representation of the city flickered above the inked lines of the map, projected from one of the tech-priest’s mechadendrites. The other Militarum trooper, a grenadier named Vigo, drifted in and out of consciousness with his hands laced across the bandaged wound in his chest. Half insensible with pain balms, he alternated between bouts of weeping and reciting names Uriel assumed were his dead comrades-in-arms. Selenus had done what he could for the man, but his treatments were not intended for mortal physiology and the wound was deep.

‘Ah, Captain Ventris,’ said the Mechanicus priest. ‘Your lack of obvious urgency tells Adept Komeda that his oscillating, spectral scattering was able to obscure our passage, yes?’

‘It has given us a breath, nothing more,’ said Uriel. ‘I must assume the necrons will overcome your efforts sooner rather than later. This location will not remain safe for long.’

Uriel bent to look at the map. Situated on a wide isthmus linking the eastern and western continental masses, Port Setebos was bounded on the north and south by a dark and oil-slicked ocean. Its industrial sprawl undulated over the city’s ten sacred hills, each dedicated to a different Imperial saint. Adept Komeda’s reading of visible alphanumerics put their current position on Corvus Hill in the north-eastern reaches of the port. From their vantage point on the level above, Uriel had seen Sabbat Hill, Sabine Hill, the edge of Celestine Hill in the west and, at the summit of the port’s northernmost temple, the flaming beacon of Ezra Hill.

‘How recent is your map?’ he asked Vivaro.

Elia coughed into her sleeve and said, ‘Sorry. It’s the one Mosar, I mean, Captain Mosar, was issued by the cartographae when we first deployed to Sycorax. I kept it up to date with grease pencils as best I could, but it’s not exactly current. We just used it to plot our patrol routes to the vox-relays the company was due to repair.’

‘Then it’s the best we have right now,’ said Uriel. ‘Update it as we go, understood?’

‘Affirmative,’ replied Vivaro.

‘Have you and the adept managed to plot us a route back to Anchorage?’

‘Adept Komeda wishes he had better news,’ began Komeda, ‘but primary, secondary and now tertiary routes back to Anchorage Citadel appear to be blocked by collapsed mega-structures or have been rendered impassable due to secondary infernos.’

‘You’re saying there’s no way through?’ said Pasanius.

‘Not as such, but the unknown nature of the city’s structure, combined with Adept Komeda’s inability to link with Anchorage Citadel’s noospheric network, is making it impossible to update his schemata and to be entirely sure of any route he might plot.’

‘Might the interference on the vox be the same thing preventing you linking with the noospheric network?’ asked Uriel.

The blue light of Komeda’s augmetic eye flickered and he said, ‘At this time Adept Komeda cannot say for certain, but it is certainly possible.’

‘What other possibilities are there?’

‘Perhaps the volume of resonance blockers and phase disruptors installed throughout the city is hampering our ability to connect with friendly forces.’

‘But you don’t think that’s it,’ said Pasanius. ‘Do you?’

‘Though possible, it seems unlikely,’ admitted Komeda. ‘In this case, Adept Komeda suspects necron activity lies at the heart of his inability to establish Mechanicus links, though he has never previously inloaded research literature that correlates to what he is currently experiencing. Truthfully, it leaves Adept Komeda more than a little unsettled to be so severed from his fellow adepts.’

Uriel ignored the adept’s discomfort and stared at the map. He hoped he might see something Komeda had overlooked, but the hazy, jumping holo offered nothing beyond a rough approximation of potential routes.

‘So what’s our exfil-route?’ asked Pasanius, looking directly at Uriel. ‘Since the riverine route is blocked by fire, should we keep pushing through the hab-districts and hope we don’t hit a dead end, or do we cut west towards the water, and pray a route opens up south?’

‘I am not in the habit of praying for good outcomes,’ said Uriel. ‘The whole city is a maze of debris that makes every choice of direction a matter of guesswork and instinct over anything factual. Any route we chose might be a blind alley.’

‘Aut viam inveniam aut faciam,’ said Elia Vivaro.

‘What’s that?’ asked Pasanius.

‘It is an ancient form of High Gothic, a proto-language if you will,’ said Adept Komeda, cocking his head to the side and giving Corporal Vivaro a curious look. ‘Attributed to a general of Old Earth when faced with an impassable mountain range.’

‘What does it mean?’ asked Uriel.

‘I will either find a way or I will make a way,’ said Elia. ‘I read it in the librarius progenium on Caen when I was in my last year before the Muster, and, well, it just stuck.’

Pasanius grinned. ‘I like it. Very Astartes.’

‘Indeed it is,’ agreed Uriel.

‘Captain Ventris,’ said Cyprian over the vox. ‘Movement on the western approach.’

‘What is it?’ said Uriel, as the Swords of Calth ratcheted up their alert posture.

Cyprian paused before answering, and Uriel exchanged a wary glance with Pasanius. Cyprian was not known for hesitancy in positive identification of targets.

‘What are you seeing?’ asked Uriel.

‘I… It looks like…’

‘Like what?’ pressed Uriel.

‘It looks like a procession, brother-captain,’ said Cyprian.

To Uriel’s eyes it looked less like a procession and more like a primitive burial ritual.

Following Cyprian’s alert, Uriel and the rest of the Swords of Calth mustered out of the ruined hab-block and made their way down to the loading docks. They arrived in time to see the passage of the necron host, and it was as strange a sight as any Uriel had seen in his time as an Ultramarine.

Taking care to remain at least two hundred metres distant and using the clouds of dust thrown up by the procession to obscure their presence, they followed the xenos deeper into the city. At first, they had been careful to avoid detection, but with every step it became clear the necron host was either oblivious to or uncaring of their presence.

At its centre was an elongated floating vehicle: a ribbed palanquin of ash-stained bronze that had all the appearance of some ancient seafaring galleon stripped of its hull, leaving only the bones of its keel and beams in place. It drifted down the rubble-choked street, sending up a thick, grey shroud as whatever stuttering force held it aloft ploughed the debris. Its raised rear section housed what appeared to be an empty throne of jade, perhaps where a pilot might sit, but whatever malign will guided the vehicle was a mystery. It canted to one side, as though damaged, and spitting fronds of jade light trailed from the drive section at its rear.

At first, Uriel thought the vehicle was some form of necron transport; then he saw the swaying bodies within were human, shackled in restraints like enslaved rowers on a war-galley or hung on chains like slaughterhouse meat.

Cyprian’s use of the word procession was rendered apt by the host of creatures surrounding the drifting vehicle, each carrying or dragging a limp human body on a chain hooked to their wide-plated shoulders. Even from this far back, Uriel could tell many of the bodies were still alive. The palanquin was surrounded by scores of these shambling creatures, their metallic bodies draped and stitched with what Uriel at first mistook for pale and bloodied rags in a mocking approximation of clothing. But then he saw the slicks of blood.

The necrons were clad in ragged strips of flayed human skin.

Anger and revulsion filled him as he took in the dead-skin masks and scraps of hair clinging to the flesh draped across their misshapen skulls and lifeless faces. Where they had cut around dead eyes, lifeless orbs buzzed and glitched, sickly green and ember red.

Their body plan was necron, but these were no serried warrior class; these were hunched, wretched things that looked as though they had just clawed their way from somewhere dark and forgotten beneath the earth. Their arms were skeletal and twisted, tipped with long razor claws like swords that dripped with fresh blood. This limping, hooting mass that screeched with hideous, metallic cries put Uriel in mind of the flagellants of Old Earth, lunatic zealots who once roamed the dark ages of the world in bloodied rags, seeking death at the end of all things.

‘What in the name of all that’s good and holy are they doing?’ wondered Petronius Nero, his fingers clenched around the hilt of his sword, eager to be unleashed.

Pasanius shook his head and said, ‘Reminds me of–’

‘Don’t say it,’ warned Uriel, knowing exactly what name he was going to utter.

‘We saw horrors beyond measure beneath that black sun,’ said Pasanius. ‘Horrors only a lord of debauchery would dare dream, but I’ve never heard of necrons behaving like this. Have you?’

‘I have heard dark rumours of flesh-hungry necrons, but I never truly believed them,’ said Uriel. ‘But this? No. This is beyond anything I have learned.’

‘Why are we following them?’ asked Livius Hadrianus, keeping his meltagun trained on the shambling creatures. ‘Isn’t our objective to return to Anchorage?’

‘Adept Komeda shares your assessment of the situation, Brother Hadrianus,’ said the adept, keeping close to Brutus Cyprian. ‘Even a modicum of deviation from our route towards a safe haven is not worth the risk of following these… things.’

‘I disagree,’ said Ancient Peleus. ‘Whatever this is, we need to know more. It could shed light on their ultimate aims on Sycorax.’

‘There is something unnatural in this,’ agreed Uriel. ‘Necrons care nothing for the bodies of the slain. To them, we are vermin to be cleansed from worlds that were once theirs.’

‘Was Sycorax once a necron world?’ asked Elia Vivaro. She and Kyra supported Vigo between them, matching their pace with Apothecary Selenus and the wounded Taysen as they sought to keep their comrade’s delirious moans of grief and pain to a minimum.

‘Unknown, Corporal Vivaro,’ said Komeda. ‘Usually such worlds are blasted wastelands, utterly bereft of life, likely self-inflicted by the necrons, but with enough passage of time, even the most lifeless of worlds may become viable for colonisation by newly arisen species.’

‘It matters not whether they once claimed dominion over this world,’ said Uriel. ‘Sycorax is a world of the Emperor. Their time has passed. This is the age of the Imperium.’

‘I wonder if the necrons said the same thing?’

Uriel paused and said, ‘What do you mean?’

‘That maybe they called the time they lived in the age of the necron or something like that,’ said Elia. ‘I mean that, like we do, they probably considered their empire the pre-eminent one of its day. So who’s to say that some explorer of the far future might not excavate the ruins of our worlds, of Sycorax or Caen, or even Terra, exhuming the dead from their tombs and studying them like the Mechanicus does whenever we clear out some ancient ruins for them, trying to learn our language, translate our writing, and figure out who we were.’

Petronius Nero turned to Vivaro and said, ‘Have a care, corporal. Your words could be construed as heretical. They imply that Terra will one day fall.’

Elia appeared to realise what she’d said, and her mouth fell open.

‘I’m so very sorry, Brother Nero, that wasn’t my intent, truly,’ said Vivaro. ‘I’m just scared. I was just thinking aloud, I’m sorry.’

Uriel raised a hand for quiet, seeing the necron procession approaching a monolithic structure that sat at the base of a low hill. Its cliff-like walls stretched for a hundred metres in either direction, emblazoned with scorched eagles and smoke-degraded binaric signifiers. Dozens of transit rails and surface roads looped around it, converging at a bewildering array of lifter cranes, the coiled remains of snapped low-orbit elevator cables, and supply bays filled with overturned shipping containers, off-world cargo berths and heavy road-rigs.

‘Orbital Distribution Hub Sigma Seventy-Seven-Kappa,’ said Komeda reading the binaric signifiers aloud in response to Uriel’s questioning look. ‘Goods and refined materials are shipped here from the local environs for onward transportation. Either over the sea or, more usually, off-world to mass-carrier tithe-ships in orbit.’

‘Look,’ said Elia. ‘There’s more of these vehicles.’

Uriel followed where the corporal indicated, and saw she was correct. Six more of the strange palanquins bearing their human cargo were approaching the distribution hub. They too were escorted by the bloody, skin-wearing necrons, and the synchronicity of their simultaneous arrival unsettled Uriel more than he cared to admit.

They followed the approaching processions of necrons until each one had vanished within one of the gaping loading docks.

‘Why in the Emperor’s name are they bringing bodies here?’ asked Pasanius.

Approaching the distribution hub presented no difficulties. Hundreds of toppled cargo containers provided ample cover, and the necrons had taken no precautions to guard against pursuit, nor left a rearguard of any sort. Uriel held his boltstorm gauntlet out as he led his warriors into the darkness within the enormous building. Dust hung in veils, and recent fires filled the air with the stench of accelerants.

The interior tasted of metal and rotten flesh, of quarantine counterseptics for off-world goods and the heaviness of air trapped for too long without recirculation. The hum of machinery was still audible, and towering stacks of industrial shelving vanished into the darkness of the high vaulted roof.

Endless lines of still-functioning belt-conveyors filled the echoing space, snaking from convergent ends of shelving where the remains of freshly skinned servitors slumped at their stations. Adept Komeda hurried over to a wretched-looking creature lying across a scanning terminal, its skinless body like a torso diagram of musculature with a single stump of a fleshless arm. Shipping boxes and crates of all sizes lay stacked around it, spilled from the carousel by the blockage of its dead body.

‘Oh no, this is not right,’ said Komeda. ‘Look!’ The adept’s voice echoed from the girders and through the canyons of the structure.

‘Keep your damn voice down,’ hissed Pasanius.

‘Look here!’ said Komeda, ignoring Pasanius’ warning and moving down the line of mutilated servitors. ‘They have all been stripped of their augmetics. Every one!’

‘That’s the first thing you noticed?’ said Brutus Cyprian. ‘Not the fact that they’ve all been skinned?’

The tech-priest ignored him, aghast at what he was seeing. ‘Adept Komeda has never witnessed such desecration of the Omnissiah’s humblest servants! No, no, this will not do!’

Uriel turned over the nearest body. The corpse was waxy and hard from the preservative unguents pumped within, more like a mannequin than something that had once been alive. A splintered nub of bone protruded from its shoulder joint, together with strips of circuit ribbons and frayed wires. Its chest cavity had been split open and whatever machinery had once been implanted upon its heart and lungs was now missing. Below the waist nothing remained save a dripping spinal augmetic, dangling on slack cords of sinew.

‘Why would they do this?’ he asked.

‘Adept Komeda does not know. The absent devices are fit only for employment in servitor-physiology, and only within this kind of environment. To achieve optimal efficiency, the Logisticus ensure each servitor’s motive limbs or traction units are slaved to move only between the racking and the distribution or packing lines. Even removed, they would be quite useless and, indeed, dangerous if fitted to a baseline human.’

Leaving the mystery of the skinless and disassembled servitors behind them, Uriel led them deeper into the distribution hub, now realising how vast it truly was. Entire districts of racking had collapsed, and they climbed over mountains of supplies, raw materials and items Uriel couldn’t conceive as being tithe-worthy: tableware and cutlery, clothing that was utterly impractical for anything but ceremonial use, tied batches of cables for devices centuries old, and machine parts neither Adept Komeda nor Techmarine Taysen could identify.

They passed hundreds more servitors, all stripped of their skin and augmetics and left where they had fallen. Broken glass crunched underfoot, but the sounds were swallowed by the growing noise of unstable power, the buzz-saw screech of cut metal and a droning sound like a pilgrim’s chant.

The path led them to a fallen set of racking that had been toppled to form a blasphemous kind of processional archway, and – taken together with the curious chant-like sounds – reminded Uriel of the profane temples he had seen on Medrengard. Beyond the archway, he saw flickering lights: arc-welder blue, blood red and the strange alien green common to necron sites throughout Port Setebos.

‘Whatever they are doing, it is through there,’ he said.

They threaded a path through the crushed boxes and crates that had fallen from the racking, and eased themselves into position to see what lay beyond. Uriel’s eyes widened at the sight of what resided at the heart of the distribution hub.

‘Guilliman’s Oath…’ hissed Pasanius.

‘Omnissiah’s witness…’ added Komeda, horrified by what lay before them. ‘So many…’

Uriel kept his counsel, taking in the vista before him.

The heart of the vast building had been entirely gutted by the necrons and transformed into a nightmarish scene of biomechanical horror. Grotesque, beetle-like things with segmented carapaces and heavy claws patrolled its periphery, dismantling the metal of fallen shelving and pushing the debris into their lamprey-like maws. Chittering scarabs attended them, as well as floating, asymmetrical orbs that pulsed and wheezed chemical breath like tyrannic spores.

But Uriel’s earlier instinct that this was some form of hideous temple was all but confirmed by the sight of the damaged war machine at the chamber’s heart.

It hung suspended within an arcing spiderweb of eldritch radiance like a sacrificial godhead, and four multijointed spindle-legs dangled uselessly from its underside. Only one appeared potentially capable of bearing any weight, the others buckled and held beneath its carapace as though it were a wounded animal keeping injured limbs clear of the ground. Limp ropes of shredded xenotech hung from great rents in its armoured carapace, and triform crystalline eyes pulsed rhythmically with dim green light, like a dormant machine awaiting reactivation.

A hundred or more of the flesh-wearing necrons surrounded their broken god, circling it with clawed arms upraised and offering prayers in the form of demented barks and screeches. And with each pulse of its glowing green eyes, they paused in dreadful expectation, as though it might suddenly wake and pass amongst them.

Woven within their alien cacophony were sounds that might once have been a hideous proto-language, a depraved prayer so ancient it was beyond comprehension.

And those prayers were heard by the priest of the devil-machine, the theta-level threat that had brought the Swords of Calth directly into Port Setebos from the Vae Victus.

‘Is that… it? The Nightbringer?’ said Pasanius, careful to keep his voice low, though there was surely no way it could carry to the xenos below.

Uriel didn’t answer. The backplate of his armour that had borne the brunt of the blow the star god had struck him was entombed beneath the Fortress of Hera, yet he swore he could feel the pain of that old wound.

‘Impossible to say with certainty, but if so, then it is much reduced since last we faced it.’

‘Perhaps it has diminished without its star-killing vessel,’ said Pasanius.

‘Perhaps,’ allowed Uriel, unwilling to underestimate this creature, whatever it was.

Its form was impossible to make out clearly within the coruscating mass of dark energies swirling around it, but Uriel could see dreadful hints of tattered robes, a skeletal musculature and a long staff that bent the light around it in unnatural ways.

He tore his gaze from the creature and the wounded war machine to the hundreds of steel slabs arranged in concentric circles around the necron construct. Upon each was one of the human bodies brought in by the floating palanquins. Attending them, like medicae around a wounded soldier, were needle-fingered thrall-creatures with bulbous torsos, featureless faces and solitary, unblinking eyes in the centre of their ovoid skulls. They worked machines that had until recently been employed in the shipping of goods, but were now stabbing at the flesh beneath like instruments of excruciation.

‘What in the Emperor’s name are they doing?’ said Pasanius.

‘I do not know,’ replied Uriel.

‘I know an assembly yard when I see one,’ said Kyra, helping Elia prop their mortally wounded comrade against a broken crate of washers and screw-bolts. He grunted in pain, clutching his grenade launcher close to his chest like a talisman. Uriel was reminded of ancient warrior cultures that required a fighter to die with a weapon in hand to be assured a place in some mythic afterlife.

‘What do you think they’re assembling?’ asked Pasanius.

‘I’m not sure,’ said Kyra. ‘Perhaps they’re trying to… make more of their kind?’

‘I do not believe that is the case,’ said Komeda, reining in his disgust at what the xenos were doing with admirable speed. ‘As far as the Mechanicus understand such things, the necrons are not a constructed life form.’

‘Then what are they doing?’ demanded Uriel.

Komeda pointed to a group of the thrall-creatures as one used its sickle hand to pare the flesh from a dead man’s shoulder. Another moved in and sawed through the bone, wrenching the limb clear before a third placed a servitor’s buckled manipulator arm in its place. Sparks flew as the assembly machine’s welder attachment bent to suture the limb in place. Burned muscle and skin melted beneath the burner tip, leaving the arm hanging by frayed tags of molten flesh and metal.

A pair of the drifting, asymmetrical orbs with extruded frond-like tentacle limbs floated over the corpse, and whipping pincers extended from their sides to inject the body with noxious fluids. The corpse shuddered as pulses of green energy lit up its organs from within, and vile, ectoplasmic smoke drifted from its rictus grin.

‘Current visualisation leads Adept Komeda to believe there is a… desperation, if you will, to this process, as though they are prepping these bodies for some form of rebirth. It almost seems as though this is – in their debased way of thinking – a means by which they feel they might save these people.’

‘Save them from what?’ asked Uriel.

‘Adept Komeda cannot say, but whatever their desired outcome, this is crude to the point of madness. The lack of sophistication is more akin to the haphazard augmetic surgeries of the greenskins than any available research into necron technologies.’

‘I told you this whole campaign felt off,’ said Pasanius. ‘There’s something wrong with these necrons, like their minds are broken or they’re trying to do something they can’t quite remember.’

‘Adept Komeda, might there be anything to what Pasanius says?’

‘Impossible to say for certain, but Adept Komeda agrees that this has all the hallmarks of a corrupted awareness subroutine, like a servitor-golem that performs a task even though said task has already been completed, is no longer required, or is ultimately destructive. Like an endlessly repeating memory of a task long ago completed, but now forgotten…’

Uriel studied the scores of thrall-creatures as they moved between the slabs, bearing yet more augmetic limbs hacked from the facility’s servitors for the automated machines to crudely graft to corpses.

‘Looks like they’re bringing in more bodies,’ said Pasanius, nodding to where a pair of floating palanquins entered the chamber through a loading dock where a bulk rig-hauler sat with its drive plant still rumbling and filling the air with toxic fumes from its exhausts.

The palanquins were dragging something heavy behind them, but the light from the palanquins and the fumes from the rig-hauler obscured whatever it was.

‘Wait, that’s… that’s… the lieutenant… It’s Rheman.’

Uriel turned back to the wounded soldier, who stared with undisguised hate at the necrons. The man’s face was dark as mahogany, but his pallor was ashen and streaked with sweat, and fresh blood seeped from the bandaged wound across his chest.

‘Emperor’s mercy, Vigo’s right,’ said Elia. ‘I see Captain Mosar too… Look!’

‘They’re all there,’ said Kyra, one hand over her mouth. ‘I see Ghalia and Yvrent too!’

Uriel saw the mounting horror in the faces of the Militarum soldiers as they recognised more and more of their dead soldiers arrayed on the slabs before them.

‘Captain,’ said Petronius Nero. ‘Look…’

Uriel followed his sword-champion’s gaze and the blood chilled in his veins as the rig-hauler’s exhaust fumes cleared enough for him to see what the newly arrived palanquins had brought their god.

‘Zethus,’ said Pasanius.

The Dreadnought had one buckled leg and his left arm was bare of its armoured plating, likely torn away in the crash. His cannon appeared to be intact, but his proud sarcophagus leaked brackish amniotic fluids, and portions of his upper glacis had been caved in like he’d been struck by the Reaver Titan at Anchorage Citadel. Tethers of green energy held his assault cannon immobile and dragged him forward, though he fought with every fibre of his being. Even from the opposite side of the chamber, Uriel could hear his curses and threats of violence.

‘To arms,’ said Uriel. ‘We’re going down there to get our brother.’

Komeda put a metalled hand on Uriel’s shoulder. ‘You can’t possibly mean to engage in battle here, captain?’

‘That’s exactly what he means,’ said Pasanius.

‘Captain Ventris, surely it is better to regroup with Imperial forces at Anchorage and return in greater strength?’

‘Our brother needs our help now, and these are the people we were created to protect,’ said Uriel. ‘They are citizens of the Imperium. Servants of the Emperor. To allow an enemy to violate them like this cannot stand.’

‘The people below are either dead or beyond our help,’ said Komeda. ‘As distasteful as it is to admit, Adept Komeda sees no tactical sense in engaging these necrons.’

In the end, the discussion was ended by Vigo Tengger. Wounded and near death, he unsafed his Voss-pattern grenade launcher and fired a salvo of air-bursting frags into the hub with a delirious cry of anguished hate.

‘For Caen!’ he screamed as percussive detonations ripped through the hub.

The blasts threw dozens of thrall-creatures into the air, and razored shrapnel obliterated two of the hulking beetle-like creatures. Hard bangs of explosions echoed through the hub as shockwaves smashed unsecured machinery and shredded corpses beyond further desecration.

The devil-machine held aloft in the crackling arcs of energy swept its triform eyes over to them, and the light within the orbs changed from a slow pulsing green to vivid red. Beneath its crooked legs, the priest aimed its staff in their direction and loosed a spine-scraping shriek that filled the chamber.

And the skin-clad necrons, blood-painted and corpse-eyed, ceased their endless circling. They saw the intruders in their midst.

‘Swords of Calth,’ said Uriel, drawing his blade. ‘With me!’

6

After watching his Scouts set off back to Anchorage Citadel, Telion moved east as daylight faded, skirting the manufactory districts close to the water and moving through ruined hab-districts clustered around the base of Sabine Hill. Oncoming darkness helped him blend into the ruins, even as the unreliable illumination of the necrons’ green night-haze arose to cast imperfect shadows.

With night fallen, Telion took pause in the ruins of what had once been Hab-Block Corvus 19’s industrial laundry, concealed between stacks of washing and drying machinery. Thanks to a series of cracked pipes, the floor was sticky and the air heavy with the ammoniac stink of disinfecting chemicals.

The laundry’s east wall had been blown out, and he walked his eyes over the path he would soon take towards his next place of concealment, a canted block with its side cracked wide – Hab-Block Pallas 45. An open window on its fifth floor would allow him to reach the upper slopes of the hill and give him a clear view to the east and north, areas he’d identified on his visor map as prime sniper hunting grounds. And if there were any location in Port Setebos better suited for an enemy sniper to pick off Imperial targets of opportunity, Telion couldn’t see it.

To reach Pallas 45 would mean being out in the open for a hundred metres, but with plenty of long shadows, overhanging ruins and numerous areas of rubble, it offered a wealth of concealment. More open than he’d like, yes, but his instinct was telling him that to catch this killer, he needed the perfect blend of speed and stealth.

Move and observe, that was the way. Study the ground, rehearse the route in his mind.

Plan for success, but imagine every contingency.

It wasn’t fast, but it was safe. Or at least as safe as moving through a contested urbanised warzone could be. A city like this offered a lone Scout many opportunities for cover and concealment, but it offered those same things to an opponent. And this opponent was exceptionally skilled, with unnatural abilities and technology beyond those even the greatest human scout could bring to the fight. Telion tried not to think of the havoc the Deathmark had wrought on Damnos, the many brave warriors it had struck down with impunity.

Warriors who were supposed to have been safe under Telion’s watchful eye…

Unconsciously, his hand slid down to a point just above his left hip. The injury had long since healed, but the memory of the pain was just as sharp today as it was when the Deathmark had shot him. Only his innate sense for danger – a sense shared by every old sniper he knew – had prompted him to displace so that a shot that would have taken his head off had instead only wounded him.

This wasn’t the same creature, he knew that, but he found it impossible not to conflate that killer with this one. They couldn’t be the same creature, and though he’d failed to eliminate the Deathmark on Damnos, perhaps killing this one would bring him a measure of closure.

Moving silently through the ruins of Port Setebos, Telion had been struck by the strange sense of emptiness he felt. In many ways, this city was just like any other in the throes of armed conflict: grey, dusty and filled with the smell of hot metal. He’d navigated enough broadly similar warzones, but this felt different.

Civilians were always first to flee a coming conflict, and the lack of ordinary people about their day-to-day business in occupied territory was a prime indicator of imminent enemy activity. Yet Port Setebos didn’t feel like a city that had been evacuated; it felt as though it had been violently and instantaneously depopulated. Much of the city’s infrastructure had been subsequently damaged in the fighting between Militarum units and necron forces, but the hab-districts had a haunted feel to them.

Soldiers were the worst for battlefield superstitions, and Telion could write a book on the number of tales he’d heard about war-spectres leading units to ruin or return, impossible tales of survival and curses of the long-dead claiming the lives of the incautious or disrespectful. He tried not to indulge such beliefs, but the synchronicity of the Deathmark’s appearance and the more he saw the paraphernalia of quotidian life still in place, the harder it was to shake the feeling that Port Setebos was filled with ghosts of the past.

He’d seen tables still set for meals, bowls filled with protein gruel, still-running taps and clothes laid out ready for a work shift. In many places, he saw trunks and kitbags prepped for a family’s departure, but left abandoned next to open footlockers. He saw unlaced boots waiting by open doors, ready for children to put on, coats piled next to them, transit papers left abandoned on tabletops.

Thousands of civilians were taking refuge within the walls of Anchorage Citadel, but nowhere near the number who called Port Setebos home.

Where had they gone?

And though he’d also seen bodies, hundreds of bodies, trapped in their buildings or half buried in the rubble of the city, it wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the discrepancy.

That was a mystery for the ordos to explore; he had more immediate concerns. With one last run-through of his route, Telion slid from cover and began his crossing.

<Seismographic anomaly in Celestine Hill district. Exponential magnitude growth.>

The monotone voice in Fabricatus Ubrique’s mind belonged to a servitor, hardwired into the ninth decima of the Keep’s geological monitoring tier. A jagged waterfall display of spiking tectonic activity appeared in the corner of her vision.

‘No, that cannot be right,’ she said.

‘Fabricatus?’ asked Alexia, looking up from her calculations on a Munitorum manifest. ‘Is something the matter?’

‘I am not sure yet,’ said Ubrique, parsing a compartmented section of her consciousness to the servitor and projecting its inloads before her in the noospheric veil. The data-field swam with static, but the information was indisputable.

Casimir came over from a conversation with General Gurenti. The dog-end of a smoking lho-stick hung from his bottom lip.

‘Is something wrong?’ he asked.

‘Deep-core seismic augurs are indicating incoming tectonic activity far beyond what might reasonably be expected in this region of the world,’ said Ubrique.

Casimir threw up his hands in frustration. ‘An earthquake? That’s all we need right now!’

‘No,’ said Ubrique, drawing inloads from surrounding augurs in an ever-widening net. ‘It is far too localised and precise for that.’

‘Then what is it?’ demanded Casimir. ‘Are you sure you’re reading whatever’s in front of you correctly?’

‘I am a high fabricatus of the Hollow Forge of Lucius,’ snapped Ubrique. ‘A planet with the power of a caged sun at its core, a global fusion reactor of unimaginable power that requires constant, highly detailed monitoring, so, yes, I believe I am reading the seismographic data correctly. But if you doubt me, see for yourself.’

With a gesture from her mechadendrites, Ubrique swiped the data on her noospheric veil over to the hololith. The projection table immediately lit up with a dancing swirl of light. The glowing outline of Port Setebos floated a metre above the surface, and below it, a searing spike of light like a tall and slender cone was rising up towards it.

Gurenti, Alexia and Casimir gathered around the table, rotating the image.

‘Can you identify it?’ asked Casimir.

‘Whatever it is, it is not natural,’ said Ubrique.

‘Necron?’ asked Alexia.

‘Almost certainly.’

‘General Gurenti, put all units on alert,’ said Alexia.

The Militarum man nodded and called for his vox-officer as the spike of energy continued to rise. Orders began flowing to all companies throughout the city.

The glowing energy spike on the hololith continued to solidify and grow as Ubrique drew in data from augurs sunk into the rock along the length of the isthmus.

‘How long until it reaches the surface?’ asked Casimir, lighting a new lho-stick.

Ubrique’s calculations took less than a pico-second.

‘Assuming a constant growth, whatever this is will reach the surface in nineteen minutes and twenty-four seconds.’

The time for stealth was over. This was the moment for the Space Marines to make war the way they knew best.

Hard, fast, brutal and utterly without mercy.

Chem-stimms pumped hard through Uriel’s muscles, hearts and lungs. Every part of him, already optimised for killing, surged with power. His strength was inhuman, his speed of thought was numinous, and the biomechanical force of his body was greater than ever before.

Sprinting through the slabs towards Zethus, he swiftly outpaced every one of the Swords of Calth. The thrall-creatures tried to intercept him, but he bludgeoned them aside like mannequins. He was a living battering ram, the mass of his body as much a weapon as any of the killing technologies he carried. Crossing the Rubicon Primaris had made him a war machine, a killer angel of power and fury.

Uriel fired on the run, single shells only. Headshots every one.

Six downed necrons, skulls obliterated. Never had he been so accurate.

Get in amongst them. Keep them from using their weapons.

Uriel drew his sword, its edge burning with a blue light. He slammed into a knot of the flesh-draped necrons, smashing them aside before they could strike back. He slowed his charge to slam a heel down on a metalled skull, then spun and hammered his elbow through a skin-masked face. He lowered one shoulder, made a quarter-turn to his left, then reversed direction to drop to one knee.

His sword swept out, scything at thigh height to topple half a dozen enemies. Spectral green light flared where his blade clove metal bodies.

He heard shouts behind him, the clatter of armour and the ring of blades. Booming gunshots in time with hissing blasts of plasma and melta fire. A clawed necron scrambled over the nearest slab, its eyes alight with lunatic fury. It threw itself at him, and Uriel surged to meet it, sword extended, and rammed the tip through its belly.

A tight turn, both hands on the sword’s grip. He arced the necron overhead and smashed it to the ground. Its claws thrashed around the blade, but were stilled as he levered the weapon through its chest, tearing it open in a blaze of light.

Something slammed into his back; clawed arms enfolded him. He tasted the stink of old, coagulated blood.

Uriel slammed his elbow back, once, twice. The grip loosened, and he clamped his gauntlet on the skin-wrapped arm. One hard, explosive pull and the thing was off him, spun around to his front. It was a blood-soaked beast, metal and flesh woven and bound to its rusted ribs. Stolen flesh draped its metal shoulders, and its face was a mask of flaking skin, its leering mouth stained with old blood.

He leaned back and hammered his foot against its chest. The torso buckled inwards, ripping its body away and leaving him holding its arm. He threw it aside, vaulting over the nearest slab to hammer into a pack of cannibalistic necrons like a wrecking ball.

They were fast, whipping around to face him, their faces grotesque snarls of bloodied teeth. Even in the midst of combat, Uriel was shocked to see such naked emotion in the face of these mindless, robotic killers. He powered into them, cutting left and right, hacking limbs and driving his fist into death-mask faces. Gory claws scraped down his armour, but the Chapter artificers knew their craft and none penetrated.

A grisly horror in a cloak of human skin and with the front half of a human skull secured to its face with knots of wire rose up from a killing blow. Its limbs sparked and flickered with light as its arm snapped back into its shoulder socket. It shrieked with a wet, bubbling noise that sprayed Uriel with blood as it came at him once more.

Its head spun away as an energised blade cut precisely through its spine.

Petronius Nero slid next to Uriel, sword arched overhead, shield arm held level with a reversed combat blade in his grip.

‘I would ask you not to extend too far, captain,’ said Nero.

Anger flared in Uriel. ‘I do not need your protection, Peto.’

‘I understand that,’ said Nero as more of the necrons closed in, ‘but your life is my responsibility, whether you need my protection or not.’

The champion stamped forward, slamming his knife-hand into a host of necrons, punctuating each slam of metal on metal with a precise thrust of his gladius. Nero was slender for a Space Marine, his movements flowing, expertly finding space in which to move. To the untutored eye, it seemed like he had all the time in the world, but it was time he created.

With this moment’s pause, Nero took up station on Uriel’s right, as Pasanius moved into a flanking position on his left.

‘Guilliman’s Oath, you’re fast,’ said Pasanius, as Livius Hadrianus and Brutus Cyprian formed the wings of an arrowhead formation. Ancient Peleus took up position in the rear, with Selenus and the wounded Taysen in the centre.

Elia Vivaro and Kyra fought to keep up, firing as they went. Even through the fury of his combat-posture, Uriel was impressed. They could have remained in place, but as soldiers of the Imperium, their duty was to fight. Adept Komeda carried their wounded comrade, the man’s grenade launcher slung around his neck. The tech-priest was no warrior and had nothing in the way of martial augments, but he too had gone towards the fighting when called.

‘Maintain arrowhead,’ ordered Uriel. ‘And do not stop until we kill that thing.’ He aimed his sword at the alien devil-machine and its infernal priest.

This time they moved as one, a perfectly orchestrated wedge of deadly killers. The necrons swarmed them with bloody claws, but ferocious as they were, they could not stand before a perfectly synchronised squad of Ultramarines. With ammunition scarce, the killing work was done with blades, fists and rifle butts.

Uriel kept his focus on the fleeting glimpses of the creature within the storm of black light. Its form was indistinct, appearing to flicker from existence between one moment and the next as though struggling to maintain its presence. Its body writhed within the darkness, but the closer they came, the more Uriel suspected that this was not the Nightbringer, but something of it. Perhaps of the same dynastic lineage or something birthed from the same nightmare that had seen fit to spawn the necron race into the galaxy.

Less than thirty metres separated him from the creature.

‘There’s too many of them!’ cried Adept Komeda, struggling to lift the grenade launcher from around Vigo’s neck.

Uriel felt a long sword-like claw shear through the flex-seal at his waist, grunting as he felt hot blood wash down his hip. The blood clotted almost instantly, and he slammed his sword’s pommel into his attacker’s face. It cracked in half with a burst of green light.

Three of the necrons leapt on him, and their weight was immense. Another threw itself at him, claws extended for his throat. Livius Hadrianus battered it aside with the butt of his meltagun, grunting as the necrons blocked its backswing with their bodies. Before Hadrianus could push them away, more barrelled him to the ground.

‘Livius!’ cried Pasanius, hurling away a pair of screeching enemies and fighting to reach Hadrianus as a necron wrapped in patchwork skin cut away the belly plate of his comrade’s armour.

Uriel reversed his sword and stabbed back into the creatures swarming him. One fell free, the other torn loose by Brutus Cyprian. Apothecary Selenus put a bolt-round through the skull of the third.

Uriel turned back to Hadrianus in time to see the necrons feasting on him, their bloodied faces buried in his stomach to tear out the organs within. Horror filled Uriel at the desecration of a brother Ultramarine’s body.

Even as they devoured him, Hadrianus fought back. His fists bludgeoned them like maces, but so many were the necrons that he could not fight them all. Flensing claws tore his armour away, and driven by the stink of blood, the macabre xenos sliced the meat from his arms and legs as soon as it was exposed.

Uriel and Pasanius reached Hadrianus at the same time.

His boltstorm gauntlet smashed the skull of the first necron he could reach. He shot the next one, cutting down another with his sword and hammering his boot into the face of a fourth. They came apart in slicks of green light and showers of rusted iron.

‘Imperator, no!’ cried Pasanius, as Hadrianus’ struggles grew weaker. ‘Selenus!’

But the Apothecary could not reach them, not yet. He fought with the powered blade of his reductor while supporting the wounded Taysen. The Techmarine wielded his combat blade and pistol, still a potent warrior despite his many wounds.

Uriel and Pasanius stood over the body of Livius Hadrianus, unwilling to let the necrons touch him with so much as a single claw.

‘Swords of Calth, to me!’ called Uriel.

Red light bathed them from above, and the necrons Uriel had slain jerked in the glow, like skeletal puppets made to twitch in a hideous danse macabre. Shorn limbs, splintered spines and crushed skulls all flickered with liquid green corposant. Broken arms snapped into place, legs unbuckled and skulls fused back together in sweating beads of green light. Glowing eyes relit with eldritch fire, but each rebirth was somehow wrong, like a Mechanicus STC unit fed a faulty punch card.

The necrons who stood back up were twisted, nightmarish things, deformed and mutated by whatever flaw had replicated in their regenerative matrix. Instead of launching themselves at the Space Marines again, they held back, metalled teeth chattering, and scraped their claws together like a slaughterman sharpening his execution blades. The sputtering fires in their eyes shone with a terrible, insatiable hunger, a grotesque appetite for human flesh that Uriel had only ever seen in the dull, black orbs of feasting tyrannic beasts.

‘What in Guilliman’s name are these things?’ said Petronius Nero.

‘Monsters,’ said Pasanius.

‘What are they doing?’ said Taysen through gritted teeth. ‘Why aren’t they attacking?’

As if in answer, the crackling web of energies that supported the suspended devil-machine stretched and swelled, lowering it towards the ground. The thing’s wounded legs twitched as the light in its eyes flared again, and Uriel sensed just how truly insane it was, a shattered mind trapped in a metal shell, unable to escape the ruin of its broken body or fulfil the purpose for which it had been wrought.

The necrons knelt before it, supplicants abasing themselves before a terrible god.

Triform eyes of blood red bathed the Space Marines in their hellish light, and Uriel flinched at the ancient power radiating from the heart of the necron. He felt its vast intellect, cool and unsympathetic, as the red light penetrated the armoured mass of his Gravis plate, reaching down past layers of laminated ceramite, bonded adamantium and ablative weave into his skin and muscle and bone. The sense of violation was total, as though the necron were a magos biologis scrutinising the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

His war plate spasmed, the machine-spirit within rebelling at the intrusion of this unclean energy. He felt it moving through the arcane mechanisms of his armour like a parasite seeking the warmest place upon which to leech the life energies from its host. The armour’s systems fought the perverted radiance infecting its deepest functions and turning them against its wearer, but the unnatural power of the beam was impossible to resist.

‘I can’t move!’ said Pasanius as the bloody necrons closed in.

They limped like the victims of a plague virus, dragging limbs that tried to self-repair, but only kept twitching and splitting in ever more egregious ways. They surrounded the Swords of Calth like curious pioneers encountering some strange new fauna.

‘What’s happening?’ demanded Nero. ‘Taysen, how do we break this?’

Taysen’s voice was hoarse and rasping with agony. ‘Too many of my systems are non-functional, but I detect an infestation of parasitic nano-devices. My guess is that they are designed to initiate repair protocols within damaged necrons.’

‘And on us?’ said Selenus.

‘Beyond the paralysis of our armour, I do not know,’ said Taysen, and Uriel knew he was now only held aloft by his armour’s rigid stance.

Claws scored the metal surfaces of Uriel’s chestplate, and he tried to lift his gauntlet, but the armour’s systems were actively resisting him, its fibre-bundle muscles pushing against his biological strength. A skin-wearing necron’s blades slid over his gorget, easing its butcher-blade fingers beneath his neck. The nicked and rusted tips wrenched off his damaged helmet, and the full charnel-house stink of the chamber made Uriel gag. The foetid heat, mired in the stench of spoiled meat, stagnant blood and rotting corpses, made the air heavy and bitter, like an equatorial battlefield.

He locked eyes with the flesh-eating creature, seeing nothing sentient within, only an all-consuming fire, like a plague victim driven to madness by a pain they can never escape. Every muscle fought to lift his gun arm, but the armour held him immobile and locked in place. Nor was he alone in this, for every member of the Swords of Calth was just as imprisoned. Only Komeda and the Militarum troopers appeared to be unaffected, but against so many they were powerless to do anything except prepare for the inevitable.

Cyprian knelt frozen with his brother in his arms. ‘Livius,’ he said. ‘No, Livius… not like this.’

Uriel felt his pain keenly. Cyprian and Hadrianus were battle-brothers from their barrack days on Macragge, just as Uriel and Pasanius were, and the thought of Pasanius dying in this wretched slaughterhouse was a sudden knife to the heart. They had faced impossible odds together, defied death a hundred times over to fight the Emperor’s enemies. They had waged war from Ultramar to the Eye of Terror, but they had always triumphed, always found a way to endure. So many of those ways were only thanks to the indomitable friendship and courage of his dearest brother.

How had he forgotten that…?

Uriel looked up as the shadow-swathed priest of the devil-machine emerged from the red haze of its eyes. Wreathed in dark energies, it drifted towards him, its tall staff reshaping itself into a slender-bladed spear. Its body bent light around it, and the very fabric of reality seemed to churn about its dark-robed limbs. As it drew closer, Uriel saw they were not robes of cloth, but that it too was draped in human flesh, the skin so aged and warped it was like the dark, waxy flesh of a body preserved beneath the waters of a bog.

Its face was marked with white paint, a crude skull daubed over its expressionless features, and Uriel saw the same madness in its eyes as burned in those of its skin-wearing followers.

As awful as it was, Uriel knew this was not the Nightbringer.

The distended metal of its jaw split wide, its mouth working like a broken automaton attempting speech. What emerged was a horrific, gurgling howl, like the cry of an animal that sees the butcher’s hammer in the instant before it smashes its skull.

The sounds were meaningless to Uriel, but the intent was clear as the blade-handed necrons closed in and dragged them towards the twitching devil-machine.

Sacrifices…

7

Telion carefully eased forward into the shadow of an overhanging roof slab canted at a forty-five-degree angle. A broken skylight offered him a view of his route onwards, a sunken culvert that had drained away through a wide crater blown through its sides. Mostly flat, sunk into the ground by about a metre, and swept mostly clean of small debris by the outgoing water. A perfect route of advance. Perhaps too perfect, and likely obvious to any hunter, but his instinct told him he was unobserved.

It had taken him sixty-three minutes to cross this far, and even then he felt he was rushing headlong over the ground. Wide swathes of rubble made the going slow, each step laden with the potential to loose small avalanches of pebbles that might as well see him ringing a gong to announce his presence. Wherever possible he stuck to larger slabs of debris or patches of bare ground he could slowly sweep with his gloved hands. Shadows were his friend, but the flickering green glow suffusing the sky was proving to be impossible to predict in its waxing and waning.

Pallas 45 was still around fifty metres away, but Telion was confident he could get to it in less time than it had taken him to reach this midpoint. He was getting a feel for this patch of ground: the way it moved, the way it felt underfoot, how much give there was in any footfall, how much he could rely on any piece of cover.

He pulled his cloak in tighter. The reactive camo was struggling with the strange spectral patterns emanating from the sky, but he was satisfied it was keeping him hidden from sight. Telion drew a sip of water from the recyc-straw next to his mouth, and drew in a breath before moving off again.

And froze.

Movement, reflected in a fragment of glass remaining within the skylight’s frame. Someone was behind him in a shattered window of Corvus 19.

Every muscle in his body held him taut, utterly immobile.

If they had a bead on him, then he was already dead. His eyes darted from side to side, searching for any sign of the green glow that heralded the killing shot of the Deathmark. He couldn’t see anything, but would he even notice the killing light under this sky?

Telion eased his heart to a low pulse and held his breath to keep any rise and fall of his body to a minimum. His palms were flat on the ground, one to his side, the other braced on the roof slab. The spectral light in the sky shifted, dimming slightly and stretching the shadow next to him farther out. He used the motion to tilt his head to the side, using the new angle to scan the ground behind him. His eye’s targeting reticule zoomed in on where he’d seen the movement. Whatever it was, it had stopped. Had he imagined it?

No, there was definitely something there. Three centuries and more spent hunting the enemies of mankind had taught him to trust his instincts. Every good Scout learned to feel when they were no longer alone in the field.

Another flicker of movement triggered his awareness. Smashed vent station for the underground transit-lines. Someone was on top of it.

Of course there could be more than one.

Something felt off about that. The Deathmark on Damnos had only ever hunted alone, and Telion didn’t think this one was likely different.

The realisation of what he was seeing came half a second later.

‘No…’ he hissed under his breath. ‘You brave, stupid fools…’

Telion surged from cover, throwing back his camo-cloak and unslinging Quietus.

‘Over here, you bastard!’ he yelled, but he was already too late. A zipping bolt of green light flashed far overhead and exploded on the roof of the vent station. Seconds later, a body fell to the ground, armoured in blue and cream with a fluttering camo-cloak trailing behind. A gaping wound where the boy’s heart ought to be.

Vyell…

Telion spun to face the direction of the shot, a V-shaped gouge in a cratered section of roadway. He had just time to see another bolt from the Deathmark’s gun burn past him before pulling Quietus tight into his shoulder and squeezing the trigger.

Even a wild shot from Torias Telion was better than most soldiers’ best. But he knew he’d missed when a flare of green light shimmered in the crater.

It’s displaced, he thought as a third shot rang out, this time from above and to his right. Too late for stealth now; all he had left was speed.

Telion burst from cover and sprinted as fast as he was able towards Pallas 45. Less than fifty metres away, but it felt like it might as well have been on the other side of the city. He pushed off hard, risking a glance behind him to see Mokae slumped in the window of Corvus 19, the right side of his head a blasted ruin. And though he couldn’t see where the third shot had impacted, he knew either Kysen or Nicada was also dead.

I told them to return to Anchorage.

It didn’t matter. Their deaths were his fault. Part of him had known they would follow and try to help him. It’s what he would do. He had done it, back in his earliest days on Konor, taking the initiative to act beyond the scope of his orders. It had paid off, but that didn’t make it right, even though his superiors found they could overlook infractions when gifted with success.

It had paid off because he was the great Torias Telion. He always lived, but those around him…

Telion vaulted into the culvert and rolled. A metal shard gashed his forehead, spilling blood over his augmetic. His world turned red, its inner light blending with the green haze of the sky. He kept going, pumping his arms and fixing his gaze on the cracked wall in the building before him.

Ten metres.

The haze in his eyes shifted, red blood fading out, green intensifying.

Five metres.

Telion dived for cover: too late, too slow.

White-hot impact just above his left hip, spinning him around. He slammed into the rubble and rolled into darkness within Pallas 45. Blood pooled inside his combat trousers, and smouldering embers of green flame licked around the neat hole burned through the flex-seals of his armour’s gut plate.

‘The old wound,’ hissed Telion. ‘It is you… It is.’

Teeth gritted against the pain, he hauled himself back from the green-lit crack in the wall. His vision blurred and he tasted blood where he’d bitten his tongue upon hitting the ground. Black dust coated his face and beard, gritty and eye-watering.

He felt the ground shaking beneath him, but couldn’t tell if it was him or the building shaking itself apart. Telion had endured the deafening hammer blows and teeth-loosening shockwaves of heavy artillery barrages ripping the ground apart, and this didn’t feel like successive impacts, more like one endless roaring furore. A bass rumble was rising up from somewhere deep, deep underground, and Telion heard splitting stone high above as dust and debris fell from the roof. Chunks of masonry smashed down outside Pallas 45 as the upper storeys of the hab-block began collapsing.

The cracks of stone and steel splitting like tinderwood were like deafening gunshots, one swiftly on the heels of another. A shape moved in the light: someone entering the building.

Quietus lay out of reach, so he snatched his pistol from its holster.

‘Sergeant!’ yelled a voice. ‘It’s me!’

Nicada. So it’s Kysen that’s dead.

‘Damn you all!’ grunted Telion as the pain balms flooded his system. ‘I told you to return to Anchorage!’

The Scout’s face was drawn and pale, shock at the suddenness of what had just happened draining the blood from his face.

‘Help me up, lad,’ said Telion. ‘We need to move.’

‘Sergeant…’ gasped Nicada. ‘The Deathmark…’

‘It can bloody wait, lad, the damn building’s about to collapse!’

Seven hundred metres from the exact centre of Port Setebos, a chasm to hell opened.

That was how the more poetic and dramatically inclined within Anchorage Citadel later described it, and though Learchus had little time for such things, he would have thought the description apt. A hot wind blew over the upper parapets of the citadel, and even through the static of its void antennae and installed jammers, Learchus tasted the pervasive chemical-industrial stink of the port city beyond.

Whatever was coming, he feared for this world, not just Port Setebos.

He could have stayed below in the Keep, but had declared he wanted to see how the seismic event Fabricatus Ubrique was predicting would manifest with his own eyes. Alexia Nassaur had agreed with his assessment and insisted Ubrique accompany them to the roof, together with her skitarii bodyguards in their gold Lucius-pattern war plate.

‘Are we sure it’s not some kind of subterranean assault?’ asked Alexia.

‘If it were, why target the centre of the city and not the citadel?’ said Learchus.

Alexia nodded, her arms folded over her chest and said, ‘Yes, of course,’ before turning to Fabricatus Ubrique. ‘Your coordinates are correct? You’re sure of it?’

Though most of her face was immobile behind a mask, the Fabricatus didn’t bother to hide her exasperation. ‘As I told your brother, coming from Lucius grants me something of a specialty when it comes to the precise monitoring of geological movements. Yes, I am sure. The breach will be within the bounds of Forge Complex Six-Rho-Aleph Nine in seven seconds.’ Ubrique’s mechadendrites pointed to a forge complex just south of Cestus Hill.

Learchus switched his gaze from the east, using his eidetic recall of the city’s structural designations to immediately find the location without need of a map.

The complex was a vaulted structure bounded by rail terminals and transitways, soaring lifter-rigs in rust-yellow, hazard-striped hangar cranes and supply dumps of raw materials. A lone collision beacon, long since unnecessary, blinked on a high trans-vox array, and a dozen giant smokestacks leaked fumes from the freshly decommissioned reactor at its heart.

‘It’s beginning,’ he said, as the heavy slabs of the vaulted roof flexed like sodden flakboard. The pitch of the vibrations through the citadel’s stonework increased in tempo.

‘Three seconds…’ counted Ubrique.

Learchus watched the forge’s roof structure collapse, falling inwards in an avalanche of steel girders and snapping tension cables. The main structure swiftly followed, thousands of tons of permacrete walls crumbling like sand as the ground beneath them liquefied. The transmission tower groaned as it toppled like a felled tree, and a series of booming shockwaves spread from the complex in a visible ring of force.

They rippled outwards as the ground beneath the surrounding structures buckled and heaved upwards under immense, unimaginable tectonic pressure before falling deep into the sinkhole beneath. In almost perfect synchrony, the buildings surrounding the forge began collapsing inwards to the seismic hypocentre as though being pulled into the warp-wake of a translating warship. Vast foundries tumbled like a child’s construction of blocks, and towering manufactoria fell apart like greenskin structures after their occupants abandoned them.

‘Imperator preserve us,’ whispered Alexia. ‘There will be nothing left of my city…’

The ring of destruction spread outwards like the shockwave of a powerful battlefield atomic, as more and more buildings were levelled in the blink of an eye. Foundations anchored deep into the bedrock of the isthmus shattered like glass, and Titan hangars, sheet metal foundries, weapons assembly lines and ammunition stores collapsed in a cascading series of structural failures. Explosions lit the night sky as webs of interconnected power lines sheared and localised energy plants spun out of control.

Arcing lines of crackling galvanic lightning leapt skyward in a blinding cascade of uncontrolled energy discharge. Columns of fire bloomed throughout the city as ancient machineries and vast engines of production were torn apart in the expanding circle of destruction spreading from the heart of the city. The burgeoning fires and smoke obscured whole swathes of the destruction, but Learchus estimated a roughly circular area at least six kilometres in diameter had been obliterated by the event. He felt the groaning tension vibrating in the stone-and-steel bones of the citadel, like a thrumming string pulled taut to the point of breaking.

As vast as the destruction was, he feared it wasn’t the true purpose of this event. A plume of smoke and dust erupted from the centre of the levelled city, together with a grinding of stone and metal that shook the entire land mass. Entire districts along the waterfront vanished, instantly submerged under tens of metres of oily water surging up from the shore. Hundreds of tons of rubble shot skyward from the pall of dust and smoke hanging over the city – the telltale hallmarks of something vast and unstoppable pushing up from below.

Learchus remembered seeing a giant drill-transport of the Iron Warriors break the surface of Calth during the war against the Bloodborn, and for a moment considered that he might have been wrong about a subterranean assault.

‘Emperor have mercy!’ said Alexia, holding herself steady against the parapet.

‘Sacred Omnissiah…’ said Fabricatus Ubrique.

Rising from the smoke was a vast pylon, a towering edifice of angular stone harvested from the planet’s white-hot mantle and shaped by arcane engineering from the dawn of time. Hundreds of metres on each side, its flanks were gleaming silver, gold and bronze, rising from the ground with a grinding sonic assault that toppled what the initial breach had not. It kept climbing, first to a hundred metres, then five hundred. It showed no sign of stopping as yet more of its glyph-carved sides pushed up from the ground.

The picters on Ubrique’s mechadendrites whirred and clicked, capturing images of the rising pylon as it shed rubble and dust. Debris fell from it in a torrent of stone and snapped steel as it kept pushing into the sky until every mortal instinct said it must surely collapse under its own titanic weight.

And then, finally, it stopped. Over fifteen hundred metres in height, dwarfing the citadel with its cyclopean immensity. The towering pylon pierced the clouds like an impossibly slender hive, wreathed in slithering lines of emerald energies. Moments later, its upper reaches began to rotate with the grinding hum of gargantuan machinery, unfolding spines and obelisk spires like the buds of a blooming flower.

‘Fabricatus,’ said Learchus. ‘Assessment. What is that thing? Is it a weapon?’

Ubrique’s eyes were flickering with a stream of noospheric data, processing multiple inloads from the citadel’s augurs and what few surveyors remained within the city. Exchangers on her back vented excess heat as she processed multiple streams of consciousness and data augments.

In lieu of an answer, Learchus turned to Alexia Nassaur. The woman’s face was pale and drawn with fear, but the same spine of steel he’d seen in her earlier was ramrod straight. One hand was pressed to her ear as she relayed orders to her brother and General Gurenti.

Feeling Learchus’ eyes upon her, she looked up.

‘Have you seen anything like this before?’

‘No, never, but it cannot be anything good.’

‘Can you destroy it?’

‘Not from the ground, but the bombardment cannon on the Vae Victus could do it.’

Ubrique disengaged from her noospheric data processing, and held out a metalled hand. A grainy hologram of a curved metallic spire in the form of a crescent moon appeared and began to gently rotate.

‘The nearest analogue I can find to this edifice are these much smaller xenostructures from a world designated WDY-Two-Seven-Two,’ said Ubrique. ‘After-action reports describe them rising from the sands to open fire on Astra Militarum forces to devastating effect. Beams that destroyed super-heavy tanks and entire swathes of infantry in single blasts.’

Alexia put a hand on Learchus’ arm, a gesture of familiarity that would normally have irritated him. ‘I want it destroyed,’ she said. ‘Contact your strike cruiser and obliterate that thing.’

‘Mistress Alexia–’ began Ubrique.

The royal twin rounded on the high fabricatus, and said, ‘No. I won’t hear any talk of studying this technology or whatever damn thing you think it is you might try and learn about it. That is a weapon and it looks like a pretty damn big one. So if you plan to study this thing, do it by picking over its remains after we destroy it.’

Ubrique nodded. ‘I agree completely, Mistress Nassaur. This object needs to be destroyed. I was simply going to suggest coordination with Sergeant Learchus to ensure maximum accuracy. The magma bombs of a bombardment cannon are city-killers intended for use in support of Adeptus Astartes drop assaults. And, with all due respect to the gunners aboard the Vae Victus, no one knows precision and live-fire calibration like the Adeptus Mechanicus.’

‘Your assistance would be most welcome,’ said Learchus.

‘It is the only way to be sure,’ said Ubrique.

‘Then do it,’ ordered Alexia Nassaur. ‘I want it gone from my city.’

Mark X Gravis war plate had been designed to give a warrior the very best protection and offensive capabilities known to the Mechanicus, and it took eight of the flesh-hung necrons to drag Uriel towards the devil-machine.

Even as they dragged him forward, Uriel felt the ground vibrating as violent earth tremors shook the distribution hub. Supporting ironwork fell from high above and the air took on the greasy, electrical tang of a Mechanicus facility. Flickers of white corposant leapt between the necrons, but whatever was causing this seismic event, they cared nothing for it.

Artillery? Drop pod assault?

No, whatever this was, it didn’t feel like any of those, more like the delayed shockwaves that would bring down buildings in the aftermath of an attack by subterranean assault vehicles like Terrax or Hellbores. The Sycorax order of battle contained three Terrax and one Hades breaching drill in the Mechanicus arsenal, and Uriel looked for the telltale signs of such an incursion. But he could see nothing to suggest that any such rescue was underway.

Eventually the necrons released him, and the red light from the devil-machine’s cracked orbs played over his massive form. He felt the righteous anger of his armour’s machine-spirit through the implant plugs fitted along his spine. It fought against the scratching static of thousands of invasive parasites jamming its systems and working to repurpose its functioning.

‘Pasanius? Nero, anyone…?’ said Uriel. ‘Can you hear me?’

He received no response, at least not one he could hear. His earpiece was filled with shrieking distortion, a wailing, biomechanical sound that blotted any answers.

‘If any of you are receiving me, fight this. Until you can fight no more, resist!’

Uriel strained to break the hold his armour had upon him, but even with every scrap of his new strength, he could not overcome it. His gun hand tremored, and he could fractionally shift the fingers wrapped around the grip of his sword, but that was all he could yet manage.

The necrons circled their ad hoc group like scavengers, darting in to draw blood from the Space Marines with their claws in anticipation of a feast. They drew their gory talons through their flaking mouthparts, grunting and hissing at the rich flavour of Astartes blood.

Komeda huddled close to Uriel, still supporting the near-lifeless body of Vigo, though there was precious little he could do to protect the adept or the trooper. Elia Vivaro and Kyra held to Brutus Cyprian, who still knelt, even though the desecrated corpse of his battle-brother had been dragged away and placed beneath the damaged devil-machine. And though he was held immobile like the rest of them, Uriel could feel Cyprian’s fury vibrating through the sheen of his armour as the skin-draped necrons ripped open Hadrianus and devoured him like beasts.

That they did this in front of Brutus Cyprian spoke of a cruelty Uriel had never witnessed in the necrons before now. The notion of these creatures feeding on human flesh nauseated him. What need had machines of such sustenance?

The dark priest of the devil-machine lifted its spear and threw back its head to loose an atavistic howl of devotion. Red-black fluid spilled from its mouth as its camouflaging energies parted, and Uriel saw its true form was as broken as its followers and its god: a twisted-spined skeletal body that spasmed as though ravaged by some agonising degenerative nerve agent. Worse, its form flickered between gleaming silver and corroded bronze, enduring its immortal life cycle over and over again.

The creature stepped from beneath the devil-machine, and Uriel struggled to move, but the priest had its eye on a greater prize than him.

Brother Zethus.

The towering Dreadnought still fought the web of energies enfolding him, and Uriel prayed Zethus might find the strength to break the chains of green fire binding his form. Fluids spilled from his ruptured carapace, and the defiance that once barked from his augmitters was little more than a low register of pain.

The priest lifted its spear, and its blade leapt with a pellucid blue fire.

‘Do not touch him!’ roared Uriel. ‘Zethus! Zethus, awake!’

The Dreadnought made one last attempt to break free, but the damage he had already sustained was too great. Uriel saw the assault cannon arm jerking with movement, Zethus desperate for one last shot, one last act of defiance.

But the power of the devil-machine to hold them immobile was too great for even a Dreadnought to overcome. Zethus was utterly helpless as the priest slashed its fiery spear down in two crosswise sweeps and carved the ancient glacis of his sarcophagus open. Heavy plates of armour parted like mist before the blade, and stinking fluids poured from the Dreadnought’s interior in a pinkish grey flood.

‘Imperator, no!’ screamed Uriel as he saw the shrivelled, sodden remains of Brother Zethus sag in his cyborganic web without the suspension of his life-sustaining amniotic fluids. After his mortal wounding at the hands of a shrieking aeldari witch-warrior, little had been left of Zethus, just a blind, limbless torso, yet the fire of his devotion had burned with such fury that his mortal remains were set reverently within a Dreadnought.

The war machine’s iron body spasmed in its death throes as the priest reached inside and cut the withered remains from within. Uriel wept to see a hero of the Chapter so abused, and vowed vengeance by the soul of Guilliman himself.

‘Zethus!’ he shouted, but whatever spark remained of the warrior was gone.

The exposed interior of the Dreadnought’s sepulchre sparked and flickered with corposant as the green web of energy imprisoning it dissipated. Its damaged weapons systems and life support networks clattered and whined as they looked for input. Right now, Uriel wished he could rush over and climb inside the cloven chassis to somehow bring Zethus’ assault cannon to bear.

The priest limped back to the dais, climbing back towards the devil-machine and bearing its wet bounty like an offering. It lifted Zethus’ torso in a clawed hand that was simultaneously pristine silver and gnarled like the barnacled metal of a sunken oceanic wreck. In response, dozens of animate barbs of rusted metal extended from the devil-machine like predatory mechadendrites. They hooked the remains of Brother Zethus, ripping him apart in a frenzy and lifting the pieces to gashes torn in its carapace like obscene mouths.

The necrons howled as their god forced the torn scraps of meat inside its mechanised body, stamping their broken feet and tearing at the stolen skin wrapping their degenerate forms in divine ecstasy.

‘You dishonour a hero of the Ultramarines, a warrior of courage and honour,’ said Uriel, neither knowing nor caring if the machine could hear or understand him. ‘And for that I will tear you down and destroy you in his name.’

The corrupt priest turned to him, and the ghost-light in its eyes was afire with its bloodlust. Its eyes scanned the captured warriors of the Imperium in search of its next offering. The blue-hot spear stabbed out, and its bloodstained devotees rushed to do its bidding.

‘No…’ said Uriel, as the necrons began dragging Pasanius towards the dais.

Even as he said the words, he felt more than heard a whispering presence overpower the scratching static in his earpiece. At first he put it down to necron distortion, but discarded that thought as he realised it was a voice he knew.

‘Komeda?’ he said, feeling something barbed and metallic brush the skin at his hip where his armour had been split.

‘Captain Ventris… Thank the Omnissiah!’ said Komeda, his voice felt more than heard.

‘How are you doing this?’ whispered Uriel, keeping his voice low, even though the wails of the necrons filled the chamber.

‘Adept Komeda is sending subvocal vibrations from his augmented larynx through the mechadendrite’s metal and into the hyper-dense material of your armour, which in turn renders decipherable words into your brain via bone conduction.’

Uriel felt pressure at his hip as Komeda’s mechadendrite forced its way inside his armour. It pushed painfully through the thin gap between his body and battleplate towards the interface sockets at his spine, tearing the skin as it went.

‘What are you doing?’ snapped Uriel.

‘Adept Komeda believes that if he can link with your Gravis spinal connectors, he can release leucocytic mecha-purgatives that will burn the infestation from your armour.’

‘You can break what is holding me immobile?’

‘In theory, yes.’

‘Then do it,’ ordered Uriel.

‘Very well,’ said Komeda. ‘But it will be painful. For you and your armour.’

‘That is the least of my concerns,’ said Uriel, as the necrons finally brought Pasanius before their rotted priest and his killing blade.

‘Komeda!’ said Uriel urgently. ‘You have to stop.’

‘Stop? Why?’

‘I have a better idea,’ said Uriel.

Eighteen hundred kilometres above Sycorax, the Vae Victus eased into its final firing position. Hundreds of metres long, the strike cruiser was a golden-bladed starship of cobalt blue, so powerful it could end wars with just its presence. Bristling with deadly gun batteries and capable of transporting an entire company of Space Marines, it punched far above its displacement class and was the brutal workhorse of the Adeptus Astartes warfleets.

The Vae Victus had seen action in hundreds of void-wars, orbital assaults and breaching runs in the millennia since launching from Calth’s orbital graving yards, and its triumphal way boasted ten thousand battle honours in recognition of its indomitable service. Its most devastating weapon was the bombardment cannon, a ballistic, planetary-assault gun that fired plasma warheads capable of levelling cities and obliterating entire enemy battle groups in the blink of an eye.

The shell loaded into the cannon’s breech had been modified with a reduced payload by Techmarine Harkus in accordance with his own augurs and telemetry data received from Anchorage Citadel. The blast wave of a full-yield shell would all but wipe Port Setebos from the planet’s surface and send soaring tsunamis halfway around the globe. The explosive force of the blast would lift enough ash to fill the sky and devastate the atmosphere for tens of thousands of kilometres in all directions.

With the shell loaded, Harkus sent word up the cruiser to the bridge, where Admiral Lazlo Tiberius, a veteran of over four centuries of service, acknowledged its receipt from his command lectern with a tap of a callused fingertip. The Techmarine’s confirmation blinked on the slate next to command authorisation to strike the target package from the Nassaur twins and General Gurenti. Tiberius nodded to himself, studying the real-time telemetry from forward Mechanicus observers married to the projected ballistic track of the warhead on the softly glowing hololith. Its arc was updated with every passing second, accounting for changing atmospheric pressures relative to the geostationary orbit of the Vae Victus. Every scrap of data and experience told him this would be a precision shot, impacting exactly when and where it was supposed to, with precisely the explosive force required. All that remained was to give the order to fire.

But still…

It sat poorly with Tiberius to be firing on a city still occupied by Imperial citizens and soldiers, the very people they were charged by sacred oath from the Emperor and Lord Guilliman with protecting. Worse, his captain and friend was somewhere in the city, and no one could guarantee that this warhead wasn’t about to kill him.

The crew stood expectantly, waiting for him to give the order. Tiberius bridged his private subvocal comm down to the gunnery decks.

‘Bridge to Harkus.’

‘Harkus here. I already confirmed the target package.’

Though Harkus had been interred within the sepulchre of a Dreadnought and spoke with augmetic technologies, his voice had lost none of its former abrasiveness.

‘I am aware of that,’ said Tiberius.

‘Then what are you waiting for?’

‘We are firing into an Imperial city,’ said Tiberius. ‘Are we ready for the consequences?’

‘Consequences, lord admiral?’

‘If we are off target or yield by even a fraction, the damage will be incalculable…’

‘Then give the order to fire,’ said Harkus. ‘The variables in the shot only increase with every second you wait.’

Tiberius closed the link, knowing Harkus was right.

He turned to his gunnery officer and said, ‘Fire.’

8

Uriel’s sense of time had slowed in the moments since Komeda had withdrawn the mechadendrite from within his armour. It felt as though hours had passed, but it was only seconds at most. Though his every effort to break the hold of the devil-machine on his armour had failed, he still struggled. The impossibility of breaking free was no reason not to try.

Even a failed attempt might draw attention to him and be distraction enough.

‘Pasanius!’ he yelled, but his friend could not hear him. ‘Pasanius!’

The necron priest ignited the glow around its blade once more, twisting it around and aiming it at Pasanius’ heart.

‘No!’ screamed Uriel as the spear moved slowly down, gradually piercing the veteran sergeant’s eagle-stamped chestplate. A slick of blood bubbled up through the wound, steaming as it came into contact with the pulsing energy blade. Pasanius shuddered, his pain too great for whatever was holding him in place to entirely mask.

The priest wrenched the spear clear and its haft began to shorten, telescoping down as the blade curved around to form a glowing, sputtering sickle of green light. The priest’s eyes burned bright with the prospect of a mortal kill, and the bloody, flesh-hungry necrons surrounding it crept closer, hungry to see more blood spilled.

Beside Uriel, Adept Komeda let out a strangled cry and sank to the ground as his knees buckled beneath him. Crackling lines of power snapped and arced along the extended length of his mechadendrites like severed power cables. The necrons around the tech-priest backed away as though he were diseased.

Uriel’s eyes flicked to his other side as Techmarine Taysen took a lurching step forward on his broken legs. His armour was split and torn, perhaps beyond any ministrations he himself might have offered its machine-spirit. Blood seeped from fresh damage to the skin around the visible spinal ports of his armour, and only his indomitable fortitude kept him upright.

‘Yes! Komeda, you damn genius,’ said Uriel, as whips of corposant flickered around the vents of Taysen’s backpack exhaust ports, the residue of the adept’s invasive mechadendrites. A screech of alarm told Uriel the necrons had seen Taysen, but either they were too shocked at his sudden movement or considered him no real threat.

Uriel could not imagine the agony Taysen was in as the splintered bones in his legs ground together and tore up the muscles and arteries within. The Techmarine stumbled and finally fell beneath the hollow, dripping sepulchre that had once contained the living remains of Brother Zethus. He crawled the last yard and propped himself up against the Dreadnought’s leg as the skin-wearing necrons circled and jabbed at him like malicious scavengers taunting a wounded prey beast.

The priest turned its head, and the necrons looked up expectantly, fully expecting permission to feast on Taysen as they had feasted on Hadrianus.

‘Hurry!’ said Uriel, as the priest extended a hand and closed its taloned fingers.

The necrons screeched, and their naked hunger was abhorrent. Uriel willed Taysen courage and strength as the dying Techmarine’s chest heaved with effort.

The first of the bloodthirsty necrons raised its claws to slice open Taysen’s throat.

A colossal, armoured fist of cobalt-blue adamantium closed on its torso. The necron had a fraction of a second to screech in surprise before its body exploded.

Zethus’ power fist tossed the sparking green remains aside and swung out to crush another three necrons. Another two died as Taysen brought the fist around in a vicious sweeping blow. The interior of the Dreadnought’s sarcophagus blazed with coruscating energies as the Techmarine’s mecha-arm interfaced with its systems via his servo-harness. His limbs twitched as his own nervous system crash-meshed with the cyborganic web within the sarcophagus. Normally the union of flesh and steel was a highly ritualised procedure, involving the Master of the Forge and High Apothecary, months-long vigils and reverent entreaties to the machine-spirit of the sepulchre and its previous occupants.

This was a union completed in seconds.

Taysen screamed in repercussive pain as he lifted his arm and the Dreadnought’s assault cannon rose with it. The ammo hopper engaged with a clatter as the barrels spun up to firing speed.

‘This is for Zethus and Hadrianus,’ said Taysen.

A blitzing storm ripped from the barrel in screaming lines of fire like white-hot beams of las-light. So close to their target, they had no time to lose the searing contrails of their launch. Hundreds of shells ripped the devil-machine in two, cut apart as if struck by a cleaving blade. Taysen’s arm wavered and the streaking arcs of fire precisely followed his movements.

The machine’s already splintered carapace blew open, torn apart by the immense overpressure of thousands of internal ricochets. Two of its hunched-up limps were sawn away and fell to the ground, scattering the bloody necrons, who squealed in terror to see their god slain. They threw up their claws as Taysen walked the fire of the assault cannon over its body, as thorough a destruction of a foe as Zethus had ever managed in life.

The web of energies holding the machine aloft were snuffed out and it dropped to the dais with a ringing crunch of deforming metal. It burned with eldritch green flames, twitching like a vast invertebrate trapped on a shoreline as volcanic fire sheeted from its inner cavities. Its orb-eyes exploded in a blaring shriek of static, and the baleful red light within them was extinguished. Uriel felt power flood back into his limbs as the paralysing force locking his armour abruptly ended.

‘Swords of Calth!’

The Space Marines surged to life, free to move and fight again.

Uriel’s battleplate burned against his skin, the heat of its effort like standing too long in the forges of the armourium. His sword flashed, and he spun to behead the necrons behind him. Their forms dissolved into stinking green ash, the human skins they had worn falling to the ground like discarded rags. Streaking bursts of fire still filled the air with light and noise as Taysen worked the fire of the assault cannon around the chamber, cutting down necrons by the score.

Uriel ran to the dais, where the priest still held Pasanius, the writhing energy blade poised to split him open.

‘Pasanius!’ yelled Uriel, knowing he could not reach his friend in time.

The priest’s metalled face was an inconstant thing, like looking at a picter reel from a lost age of the Imperium. More than just its ever-changing life cycle, this was like a thing fighting to stay locked in the one moment of time. Its rotted face gleamed with new metal, its eyes burning with newborn fury and ancient wisdom. Its reaping blade slashed down.

And stopped, the priest’s wrist clamped in Pasanius’ gauntlet.

The swirling cloak of dark energies billowed, its fury at this upstart creature palpable. The blade writhed in the priest’s grip, but before it could wreak any harm, Pasanius took a quarter-turn back and drove his augmetic arm through the priest’s chest like a pile-driver. Wreathed in green energies, his fist exploded from the priest’s back.

He ripped it out, trailing streamers of coiling green fire that ran in coruscating veins up the burnished metal of his arm. The priest staggered back, and though it had no expression, no movement in its features, Uriel saw the disbelief on its withering face. The dark light began to coalesce around it, a shrouding veil of darkness.

Uriel leapt forward, his sword singing out in a golden arc of fire. The priest’s head spun away from its body as Uriel landed, rolling to the edge of the dais, before finally coming to a stop as Brutus Cyprian placed his armoured boot upon it. Yet, still it would not die, its glowing eyes looking up in hatred as snakes of light whipped from its neck in search of its fallen body.

Cyprian stamped down, crushing the necron priest’s skull to fragments. Green fire exploded from the smashed metal, and with its destruction, the deathly energies crawling over its body turned to ash as its form finally surrendered to the onslaught of time.

‘That was for Livius,’ said Cyprian, turning and hefting the meltagun of his fallen brother.

‘Rally on me,’ said Uriel as the voices of his comrades-in-arms rushed to fill the empty silence in his earpiece. The roaring thunder of the assault cannon had fallen silent, and grief touched Uriel as he saw Apothecary Selenus kneeling with his reductor at Taysen’s neck.

He that is dead, take from him the Chapter’s due.

Petronius Nero had cleared space around him with his blade, and now led the three Militarum soldiers to the dais. Ancient Peleus walked backwards, firing one-handed as he dragged the limp form of Adept Komeda with him.

Pasanius stood next to Uriel, his face a mask of pain.

Uriel placed his hand on Pasanius’ shoulder. ‘You stand?’

‘I bloody stand,’ nodded Pasanius, bending to retrieve his bolter. ‘No choice, is there?’

Beyond the circle of the dais, Uriel saw the horror that had overcome the enfleshed necrons was beginning to wane. Already packs of them were edging back towards the dais, razor claws clicking together. The death of their god and its priest had shocked them, but a thirst for vengeance and blood would soon drive them into a frenzy of slaughter.

‘We need to move. Now,’ said Uriel.

‘We cannot outrun so many,’ said Petronius Nero. ‘Not encumbered as we are.’

Uriel shook his head, knowing exactly what Nero meant.

‘If we are slowed, we die,’ said Nero.

‘Then we die taking as many of these bastards with us as we can,’ said Brutus Cyprian.

‘No one is dying,’ said Uriel, his voice brooking no argument. ‘And no one is getting left behind.’

Uriel had returned to the Fourth much changed, in some ways he understood and many more he did not. Lord Guilliman had warned him that those who crossed the Rubicon Primaris came back different, and despite what he had told the primarch, Uriel now accepted that more of him had changed than he realised. But the fundamental heart of him would never change, no matter how powerful he became.

He scanned the perimeter, looking for a way out, a lifeline.

There, berthed in one of the loading docks…

‘Elia Vivaro,’ said Uriel, aiming his sword across the chamber. ‘The Hundred and Sixty-First Caen are a pioneer and construction battalion, yes?’

‘We are,’ said Elia.

‘Are either you or one of your fellow soldiers rated to drive that?’

She followed to where his sword was pointing and her eyes lit up.

An up-armoured promethium rig-hauler: wheeled and tracked for crossing the treacherous transcontinental mudflats, with weapon turrets fore and aft. Ablative defensive platforms adorned the fifty-metre length of its tanker-trailer. Heavy-duty rigs just like it had been a lifeline between isolated settlements and forts during the war against the greenskins, and though their armaments were technically no longer required, the Imperium wasn’t in the habit of stripping weapons from vehicles.

‘Been a while since I’ve taken out a rig that size,’ she said. ‘But, yeah, I can handle it.’

‘Swords, arrowhead on me,’ said Uriel, stepping off the dais. ‘We are getting out of here.’

They’d put a kilometre between them and the site of the Deathmark’s slaughter of their comrades, but it still wasn’t nearly far enough for Telion. They’d hunkered down as a titanic necron spire had ripped up from the heart of the city, only barely outpacing the cascading collapse of hab-blocks tumbling from the summit of Sabine Hill to its base like models on an overturned theoretical war-table. In the aftermath of the colossal xenostructure’s rise, they’d pushed on through Port Setebos at a dangerously swift pace: through fallen hab-blocks, between ruined processionals, and crossing slicks of burning promethium.

Telion’s hip burned with embers of green fire, as if a hot ingot had been plucked from a forge-furnace and placed deep in the wound. In recognition of his sergeant’s injury, Nicada had ranged ahead, a vanguard moving altogether too fast for Telion’s liking, but what choice did they have? The Deathmark had them on the run. It had the initiative, and its prey was wounded.

They paused in the bombed-out shell of a sheet metal fabricatum, the smelting and pressing machines smashed and inoperative. Giant cauldrons filled with cooled metal swayed overhead like giant wrecking balls, and the conveyors were filled with half-formed Leman Russ turrets. Shards from shattered glassaic windows littered the floor, and Telion sat propped up against the wall in what had once been an overseer’s cubicle, sweeping the spitting static on the vox-nets, trying to find any functioning Imperial transmissions.

Just hints of voices on the wind, but nothing he could lock onto.

A flyer on the wall urged those who looked upon it to work for the glory of Terra, adding that their labours were saving humanity. A torn corner flapped in the warm, electric winds blowing in from the south, somewhat undercutting the message.

Nicada eased up to a hair-thin split in the wall and peered out, angling his head back and forth and up and down to sweep the street beyond. Telion lifted his right hand, and tapped the wall.

‘Anything?’

Nicada shook his head.

‘It’s empty. As near as I can tell.’

Telion let out a breath. ‘For now. He’ll be back, lad. He’ll be quartering the area, scanning for sign of our passing and looking to get in front of us.’

‘You really think the Deathmark will pursue?’ said Nicada.

‘It’s what the one on Damnos did.’

‘And you really think this is the same one?’

Telion nodded. ‘As far-fetched as it sounds, I am certain. Everything I know tells me it can’t be the same one, but everything I feel tells me it is, lad. We both know a good sniper doesn’t pursue. You take your kills and move on. It isn’t a personal thing. You don’t duel and you don’t target fixate. That’s a sure-fire way to get yourself killed when you’re out on the ragged edges beyond the front lines.’

Telion let out a grunt of pain as he pushed himself to his feet.

‘But the Deathmark we fought on Damnos wasn’t a sniper as any of us understood it,’ he said. ‘That one could traverse the battlespace in ways that changed the rules for a hunt like this. It tracked down those who escaped it like it took their survival as a personal insult to its skill. It didn’t get me on Damnos, so now it’s here to finally add my name to its tally.’

Pain was making him talkative, and he tamped down the urge to keep speaking, knowing he was sounding ridiculous. The galaxy was too vast and uncaring of individual souls for such personal melodrama, and yet…

‘Aye,’ he said, craning his neck to look out through a buckled wall panel. ‘You’re out there, just waiting for us to walk into your trap, aren’t you?’

‘…forces…da… close. All Imperial… incom… repeat. Incoming…’

Telion recognised the voice as that of Admiral Lazlo Tiberius aboard the Vae Victus, and put a finger to his ear, trying to extrapolate the words he couldn’t hear from the ones he could. He glanced to the sky as more of the transmission’s words fell into place. There, a gradual lightening of the sky in the upper eastern portion of the heavens.

The muddy brown sky was growing ever lighter as something burned its way down through the heavy fug of the atmosphere. If Tiberius was firing on the planet’s surface, there was only one weapon he would employ.

‘Nicada!’ he cried. ‘Get down. Cover your eyes and brace yourself!’

The young Scout looked puzzled until the growing brightness in the sky poured into the fabricatum like the light of a second sun. If a bombardment shell was inbound, then cover would avail them little, but Telion had heard stranger stories of survival.

His Scout-trained eyes saw the incoming shell as a tiny black dot in the centre of the brightness the instant before it detonated a hundred metres above the ground.

Uriel led the charge of the Swords, punching hard towards the rig-hauler at the loading docks before the necrons could regain the initiative.

The Space Marines hit the aliens like living battering rams, pushing a wedge deep into the mass. Momentum was key here, not skill with a blade. This wasn’t about killing the enemy; this was about getting through them.

In the centre of the Ultramarines’ formation, Kyra and Elia dragged the unconscious Vigo between them, while Apothecary Selenus bore the heavy weight of Adept Komeda, who spat blurts of Lingua-technis while his eyes flickered with rebooting machine cant. The pace of their advance was slowed by the mortals within their ranks, but Uriel had made it clear: no one left behind.

He fought with all the power his transformation had wrought upon him. Combat secretions flooded his system from the revitaliser furnace at his heart, filling his muscles with strength and increasing the tension within his sinew coils. His every sword blow was stronger and more precise than even Petronius Nero could manage.

The necrons were attacking in a mob, en masse and without tactical nous beyond the insane need to devour the Space Marines. The death of their masters had deprived them of whatever broken command-and-control node had held them in thrall, and these blood-slick monsters were little more than beasts.

But even beasts could drag down noble hunters. Their elongated, alien skulls were cut from ancient metals and ought to have been devoid of expression, but the crude white daubings splashed across their faces and the baleful light that burned in their eye sockets betrayed a frantic hunger. Whatever intelligence these xenos might once have possessed had been replaced with a grotesque, insatiable urge to feed on flesh that drove them into the blades and bolts of the Swords of Calth.

Uriel saw the rig-hauler was less than three hundred metres away, but uncounted numbers of necrons lay between them and it. Every step and every killing blow brought them closer, but Uriel felt their pace already slowing. His sword cut left and right, smashing hard-bodied necrons from his path. Most stayed down, but too many were climbing to their feet, smashed bodies and severed limbs fusing back into place with bursts of green wych-fire.

He thrust and twisted, using his body as much as his blade. Nero fought with more finesse, but even he resorted to clubbing blows.

‘There is no skill in this,’ grunted Nero, feeling Uriel’s scrutiny.

‘Be thankful for that,’ said Uriel.

‘Never,’ said Nero. ‘One day I hope to cross blades with one who is my equal. Only the blade-mistress on Calth came close enough to be diverting.’ Uriel remembered that fight, the blurring speed of their sword blows, too fast for him to follow, sublime in its excellence, and so quickly over.

‘Cyprian!’ called Uriel. ‘Clear us some space up front.’

Brutus Cyprian backed into their wedge as Uriel and Nero smoothly parted to give him some room. The big warrior was no expert in the use of the melta, but had fought shoulder to shoulder with Livius Hadrianus for long enough to be better than most. He worked the charging lever to inject pyrum-petrol fuel mix into the chamber until he judged the priming tone to be perfect.

He braced the weapon on his hip and shouted, ‘Hadrianus!’

And a wall of fire slammed down a hundred metres from Uriel like a curtain into hell had been suddenly drawn back. A ferocious shockwave hurled Uriel from his feet, spinning him around as the world vanished in a blur of flame and noise.

Darkness and silence swallowed him. He slammed down to the rockcrete floor, his awareness spinning from the dislocation. Warning icons blinked on his armour’s wrist display; high temperatures and radiation spikes. The only sound he could hear was the harsh rasping of his own breath.

What just happened?

Uriel’s armour’s systems cycled back to life even as the regenerative chemicals and alchemies within his body flooded his system with stimulants. He rolled to his feet.

What he saw made no sense. Billowing flames filled the distribution hub, sweeping through in a raging conflagration from the distant epicentre of a colossal explosion. The entire north-western corner of the building had vanished, leaving only charred fragments of wall panels and molten framing pieces like skeletal remains. Smoke boiled inside the hub, an acrid mix of fyceline and toxins that Uriel’s neuroglottis recognised as the chemical components of ship-borne ordnance.

‘What in the name of the Emperor…?’ said Pasanius, picking himself up from the ground.

Brutus Cyprian held out the meltagun in disbelief.

‘Did I do that?’ he said. ‘Livius was holding out on us…’

‘No, that was an orbital strike,’ said Peleus. ‘Astartes ordnance.’

The necrons before them were no more, little more than a mass of glistening scrap metal. Yet even in the face of such awesomely destructive power, their remains were attempting to reform, slithering together in living rivulets of silver liquid.

‘The Vae Victus?’ said Selenus. ‘What are they shooting at?’

‘I do not know,’ said Uriel. ‘And right now, I do not care. All I know is that the path to the rig-hauler is open and that this place will not be standing much longer.’

The upper reaches of the hub groaned with the sound of buckling girders and snapping tension cables. Ceiling slabs, long lengths of ductwork and roof-mounted machinery crashed down in a thunderous cascade of smoke and steel. The rig-hauler was half buried in debris from the collapsing roof structure, but its powerful drive unit would easily shrug it off, like dust from a shoulder guard.

Behind them, the rest of the necrons began picking themselves up from the ground, screeching in fury as they loped towards the Ultramarines with hate burning in their eyes.

‘Go!’ said Uriel, and the Space Marines gathered up their mortal companions. All four were badly burned around the face and arms, but bore their hurts stoically.

‘What was that?’ asked Elia Vivaro.

‘The Emperor parted the way for us,’ said Uriel as they reached the rig-hauler.

She nodded and began climbing the ladder to the crew compartment.

‘You are sure you can handle this?’ asked Uriel as she wrenched open the door.

Elia looked down and gave him a withering stare. ‘The drill-abbots used to let me drive rigs like this when I could barely reach the pedals. Don’t worry, me and Kyra can handle Hellrider.’

‘Hellrider?’ said Uriel.

Elia pointed to the crew compartment door where the painted image of an eagle-winged avenging angel armed with a burning sword and flail was emblazoned in exquisite detail. Beneath the angel, the rig’s name was rendered in flaming, hand-painted scriptwork.

Uriel grinned. ‘As apt a name as any we might devise.’

Adept Komeda placed an unsteady foot on the ladder, his hand shaking and his mechadendrites hanging limp at his back.

‘You did well back there,’ said Uriel. ‘We would be dead but for your initiative.’

The tech-priest nodded his thanks and said, ‘Gratitude, though Adept Komeda doubts he will ever quite recover. The machine-spirits of Astartes armour are bellicose in the extreme. It will take months to rid myself of their anger.’

Uriel and the Swords of Calth climbed aboard the rig-hauler as Elia started the drive unit with the roar of an awakened dragon. The necrons were fifty metres out, their numbers thinned, but still considerable.

‘Corporal Vivaro, get us out of here!’ shouted Uriel, banging a fist on the door to the crew compartment. Moments later, the rig-hauler began to move, its thick tracks churning as it bit the heat-softened ground. As Uriel had predicted, the rig easily threw off its cloak of debris, rumbling as it picked up speed and momentum.

It lurched, almost stalling, and Uriel winced as its power plant roared in protest, its gears grinding together with a juddering screech of tortured metal.

And then they were clear and under a bleached-out sky, rumbling along a curving transitway as the entirety of the distribution hub’s roof began to fail in a cascading structural collapse that was surely going to bring the whole edifice down. Uriel looked back with no small amount of satisfaction as the horrific flesh-cult was buried in an avalanche of rockcrete and plasteel.

These necrons were gone, but he had no doubt there would soon be others after them.

Telion blinked away the after-image of the blast, the neon-bright flash that not even his augmetic eye could entirely withstand. He coughed a lungful of dust and spat a mouthful of red from a throat of frothed blood. Rubble pinned him in place, and he felt searingly hot air washing over him. He remained still, slowly flexing his muscles and gently rotating his wrists, ankles and knees to see if they still functioned. His right ankle barked in pain, but as far as he could tell it wasn’t broken. The rest of him, aside from the wound to his hip, felt functional, and he began to ease himself from the rubble.

The world was filled with light, like an overexposed pict, its bleached whites painfully bright, the smoke dark and impenetrably black. The veils of pollutants and the omnipresent smog that normally blanketed Port Setebos were gone, burned away by the force of the explosion, leaving the sky a scorched canvas of swirling ash and dust.

Telion rolled onto his side, shading his eyes with a dust-and-blood-smeared hand to see what remained of their refuge. The fabricatum had been destroyed, all but the lower metre and a half of its outer walls ripped away by the force of the blast. He couldn’t see the xenoform spire at the heart of the city, which surely must have been the shot’s target. Its outline was obscured by the vertical storms of pyroclastic debris and swirling dervishes of flame being drawn up into a mushrooming cloud of fire and smoke.

Aftershocks were still rippling through the bedrock, intersecting and amplifying each other as they ground through the tectonic plates beneath. It would be days before they would subside entirely.

Hot, dusty winds blew over him, and Telion glanced over his shoulder to see a vista of utter destruction: buildings upended or flattened, flames spewing from ruptured fuel pipes and electromagnetic squalls throwing out forking blasts of lightning in all directions.

‘Emperor’s Mercy,’ said Nicada, crawling through the rubble to reach Telion. ‘Was that a bombardment shell?’

Telion spat another mouthful of blood and nodded.

‘It was, lad, aye,’ he said. ‘But either they reduced the yield or that damn tower had some close-in defence that absorbed some of the blast.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because the whole damn city would be ash otherwise.’ Telion nodded towards the thickening column of smoke at the heart of the city. ‘Whatever that thing was, command saw it as a big enough threat that they authorised an Astartes ship to launch a danger-close strike on an Imperial city while friendly forces are still in-theatre.’

He let that sink in, narrowing his eyes as he tried to penetrate the smoke shrouding what remained of the towering xenostructure. His focus shifted between various filters to better sift through the fluctuating spectroscopic patterns of localised heat and electromagnetic distortion.

‘Sergeant,’ said Nicada urgently, adjusting the pickup on his helmet mic. ‘I’m picking up a transmission on the low-frequency Chapter network. The explosion must have knocked out the jammers and modulators blocking our comms.’

Telion reached up to key in his own vox, but the earpiece was gone, lost somewhere in the rubble. He snapped his fingers and held out his hand. Nicada twisted his earpiece free and pressed it into Telion’s palm.

‘…lead? Over?’ he heard as he fitted it within his ear. The words were overlaid with electromagnetic bleed from the blast, but the voice was clear enough to recognise.

‘I repeat, Broadsword Lead, do you–’

‘This is Telion,’ he said.

‘Guilliman’s Oath,’ said Learchus. ‘You’re alive!’

‘No thanks to that bombardment strike,’ snapped Telion.

‘Are you with Captain Ventris? Were you able to link up with the Swords of Calth?’

Telion glanced over to Nicada and shook his head. ‘No, not yet. Do you have confirmation he is still alive?’

‘No confirmation yet, but we are picking up increased necron activity around Orbital Distribution Hub Sigma Seventy-Seven-Kappa that indicates the presence of Astartes forces,’ said Learchus. ‘We are attempting to make contact, but where are you in relation to that location?’

Telion thought back to his mental map of Port Setebos, and quickly located the distribution hub, a sprawling structure at the heart of a network of transitways, intercontinental highways, orbital elevators and rail links.

‘That’s about a kilometre from us,’ said Telion.

‘Are you still at full strength?’ asked Learchus.

Telion sighed, fighting back a rising tide of guilt. ‘No, Learchus, we’re not. Aside from Scout Nicada, Squad Kaetan are all dead.’

‘No…’ said Learchus, and Telion could hear his anguish even over the vox. The man might be unbending in his devotion to the Codex Astartes, but he cared deeply for the warriors under his command.

Before Learchus could ask more, Telion said, ‘The bombardment cannon strike? You were trying to knock down that necron tower, weren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ replied Learchus. ‘Are you in position to perform a battle damage assessment?’

‘I am, but we can’t see much through the smoke. Hold.’

Telion muted Learchus and kept cycling through filters until he found one that rendered the view before him in a smeared vista of greens, reds and yellows. The devastation around the centre of Port Setebos was profoundly moving, a hellscape of rubble and the broken shards of a city that might never return.

The detonation had gouged a crater two hundred metres wide and at least sixty deep. Dark water poured in to create an oily lake Telion adjudged would soon crumble enough of the rock to link it with the northern ocean. The city around it had been completely erased, flattened by the atmospheric shockwave and burned to glass by the fireball.

And standing proud and untouched at the centre of the dark lake was the necron xenospire.

‘Target is undamaged,’ said Telion. ‘I repeat, target is undamaged.’

Book III

NEMESIS

‘It was silent as the void, and to look upon it was to know terror. It drifted above us with slow, liquid grace, and its gaze caused madness and despair wherever it fell. Those it came near took their own lives rather than endure its hellish presence.’

– Morillia, Harlequin shadowseer

9

The roadway was strewn with debris, but Hellrider’s colossal weight ground every piece of it to dust beneath its armoured wheels and reinforced tracks. The ride was far from smooth, but it felt good to be moving again, even though stealth or any hope of avoiding enemy contact was now impossible. The rig’s smoke-belching drive plant and the dust clouds of its passing would be visible for kilometres in every direction.

Every necron within Port Setebos would be aware of their position and course.

Uriel stood on the starboard fighting platform that ran the length of the rig, boltstorm gauntlet upright to his shoulder as he scanned the smoking ruins of the city and the broken transitways running alongside them. Nero manned the portside platform, while Selenus was positioned in the shielded firing step on the tanker’s topside between the fore and aft turrets.

The rig’s tracked tanker-trailer was painted with an outline-disrupting mix of olive drab and spotted brown to better camouflage it on the endless mud-plains. If that had truly been the intent, Uriel felt it was somewhat undercut by the vividness of the rig hauling it, painted as it was in gleaming red and gold with chromed pipework that shone as if new.

Anchorage Citadel was visible on the horizon, around fifteen kilometres distant, its cubist structure a geometric silhouette against the flash-burned sky. Almost as soon as they had escaped the interior of the hub, the vox-net came alive with frantic communications chatter, and Uriel had cut through it to establish a link with Learchus. After briefly swapping situational reports with his veteran sergeant, Fabricatus Ubrique exloaded a route back to Anchorage Citadel directly into Hellrider’s navigational array.

But as impressive as the citadel was, the towering spire at the heart of the city commanded Uriel’s attention. Learchus had confirmed its emergence had been the source of the earth-shaking tremors they had felt within the hub, and that it had indeed been the target of the Vae Victus.

‘What do the Mechanicus think it is?’ asked Petronius Nero, speaking over the squad vox-net from the opposite side of the tanker.

Uriel shrugged. ‘Ubrique does not know. Perhaps it is a weapon? Or a beacon? Something dangerous enough to warrant the governor-twins authorising an orbital strike within the bounds of their planetary capital.’

‘It could perhaps warrant a second,’ observed Nero.

‘Anything that can survive one orbital strike unscathed will likely survive another.’

‘It might, but we will almost certainly not,’ pointed out Apothecary Selenus.

Clicks over his earpiece told Uriel that Pasanius was in position within the inferno cannon’s blister turret mounted at Hellrider’s rear and that Cyprian had spun up the forward quad-linked autocannons at the front. Thankfully, both turrets were fully operational, and would wreak havoc on anything that came near.

Uriel’s vox clicked with Pasanius’ voice. ‘Good to be using a flamer weapon again.’

Despite everything, Uriel grinned. A heavy flamer was a specialist weapon, not one normally equipped to a line sergeant, but Pasanius had proven to be so brutally effective in its use, no one had seen fit to remind him of what the Codex had to say on armament designations.

‘Just keep any scarabs off us,’ he said.

‘You think they’ll come after us?’

‘I know they will,’ said Uriel. ‘These necrons are not like any we have seen. They seem to be driven by emotions, and they will seek to make us pay for what we did.’

‘Bring them on,’ said Cyprian, running through pre-battle weapon checks, working the mechanisms and spinning up the barrels on the autocannons. ‘This is a civilian rig, but it’s a war-fighting vehicle in all but name.’

‘They had to be,’ said Uriel. ‘Even after the greenskins were defeated in the last war, feral warbands still remained. They preyed on supply convoys, so the Nassaur twins authorised the trade conglomerates to arm the rigs so their crews could fight off any raiders.’

‘Good thinking,’ said Pasanius. ‘A little foresight goes a long way, eh?’

Uriel did not reply, seeing gleaming flashes of light on metal and bursts of jade energies in the ruins all around them.

‘Fast movers to either side,’ warned Nero.

‘I see them,’ answered Uriel.

‘Necron skimmers catching up on our rear,’ said Pasanius. ‘Heavies too. Like the palanquins we saw earlier.’

‘Enemy inbound, weapons up!’ said Cyprian, slewing the fore-turret to starboard.

Peleus turned and began climbing the curved ladder to reach the roof of the rig-hauler’s crew compartment.

‘Ancient?’ asked Uriel as Peleus stood upright, proudly defiant in the face of the incoming enemy forces.

‘With your permission, captain?’ said the Company Ancient, removing something tattered from the ammo pouches at his belt.

Uriel knew what it was even before Peleus unfolded it.

‘Granted,’ said Uriel. ‘We will fight with courage and honour beneath it.’

Peleus nodded and bent the vox-aerial over before threading it through the torn fabric of the Fourth Company banner. Slowly he allowed the flexible aerial to straighten, and the remains of the banner snapped and fluttered in the wind of the rig’s passage like the gonfalon of a patrician Rough Rider regiment.

Though it had been all but destroyed, the sight of the banner filled Uriel with pride.

‘Brothers of Ultramar,’ said Uriel. ‘The flag of the Fourth flies above us once more!’

He hammered his fist onto the eagle of his breastplate, a double beat repeated. Four fist-beats for the company, a repeating mantra that spoke to each man in a unique way, for loyalty to the Chapter meant different things to different men.

‘For Ultramar!’ said Uriel.

‘For the Fourth!’ cried Peleus.

‘For brotherhood,’ said Cyprian.

‘For courage,’ said Pasanius.

‘For honour,’ said Nero.

‘For the Chapter!’ said Selenus.

Uriel heard their oaths and wove them into something unbreakable within his heart. For what was the measure of a warrior but the worth of what they fought to defend?

‘Here they come!’ shouted Pasanius.

Despite what she had told Captain Ventris, it had been over a decade since Elia had last commanded a rig this large. She sat in the raised captain’s chair in the centre of the crew compartment, directing the giant vehicle with a wide, steel-rimmed wheel, a multitude of multi-gear levers and a host of dials and jerking needles – too many of which jittered dangerously in the red.

She followed the curve of the transitway, pushing the drive as hard as she dared and pulverising most of the debris fouling the road surfaces beneath the rig’s mass or using its armoured dozer blade to smash aside the larger pieces.

It was hard, demanding work, but Elia Vivaro was Caen born and true. Controlling heavy machinery like this was all in a day’s work to her. She’d spent her years of service in a pioneer regiment of the Astra Militarum, driving and directing enormous construction-engines of all description, building defensive revetments for super-heavy tanks, dugouts for infantry and hardened redoubts for Knights and Warhounds, and excavating the ruins of destroyed cities.

She relished the feeling of being in command of so powerful a machine.

‘This must be what being the princeps of a Titan feels like,’ she said. ‘Towering over the enemy like a god of battle. A master of war with a crew of moderati, tech-priests and servitors to enact her will in service of the Emperor.’

‘This is emphatically not a Battle Titan of the Collegia Titanica,’ said Komeda without looking up. ‘And, impressive as you are, Mistress Vivaro, you are not a princeps. Though Adept Komeda would add that, were their traditions not so inflexible, you would have made a fine Knight pilot.’

‘Maybe Hellrider isn’t a Titan, and maybe I won’t ever be a princeps, but controlling a rig like this is the next best thing. And at least I have you two for my moderati, right?’

‘You do indeed,’ allowed Komeda with what Elia suspected might be amusement. The adept was located behind Elia’s right shoulder, hooked into the rig’s drive-systems via his mechadendrites and swaying like a man on the verge of exhausted collapse. Kyra sat on her left, head down over the hololithic data-slate that controlled the tanker-trailer’s rear axle.

The noise of the drive unit was a deafening bass roar, and the churning of the tracks tearing up the roadway filled the cabin with vibrations that set her teeth on edge and her bones shuddering down to the marrow. But those weren’t the noises that concerned Elia the most.

Beyond the compartment, explosions and the hard bangs of mass-reactives punctuated the roar of the engine in staccato bursts. Percussive booms from the quad-turret just behind the compartment sounded like a pile-driver trying to batter its way through the roof. Flickering beams of green energy zipped past the cabin’s armaglass windscreen, and more damage indicators than she cared to see were lighting up the instrument panel in front of her.

‘Imperator…’ said Kyra, as another blast struck the rig. ‘There’s so many of them…’

‘The Astartes will take care of them,’ said Elia. ‘Just concentrate on the tracks. If I need to manoeuvre hard, I’ll need you to compensate at the back.’

‘Don’t you worry about me,’ said Kyra. ‘Just keep us as straight as possible. I don’t want another Volcua III on our hands.’

‘You’re bringing that up now?’ grunted Elia. ‘You try keeping a geoformer excavator level during a global seismic event!’

‘Seismic event?’ scoffed Kyra with a grin. ‘I’ve felt ogryns’ farts stronger than that.’

Adept Komeda raised a silver-skinned hand.

‘While Adept Komeda believes this form of exchange provides stress relief among soldiers, it is serving only to unsettle his already beleaguered constitution.’

Elia reached back and gripped his hand and pumped it twice.

‘Don’t you worry, Adept Komeda,’ she said. ‘We’re Caen Pioneers. We always bring our machines home.’

‘Adept Komeda sincerely hopes so.’

Actinic white light filled the compartment as something crescent shaped spun past the rig to explode in the fire-blackened structure of a gutted ruin.

‘Well… we try to,’ said Kyra.

Komeda twitched with every booming strike on the rig and its tanker-trailer. Elia suspected he might well be feeling every sympathetic impact deep within his flesh.

She instinctively ducked as swarms of the same scarab creatures that had brought down the Ultramarines gunship swooped low over the rig. Emperor alone knew what kind of damage they were doing.

‘Shit…’ said Elia as a veil of rippling green light swirled into existence two hundred metres in front of Hellrider. At least forty or so bronze-skinned necrons stepped from within, weapons levelled. She recognised this type as the same that had ambushed their convoy, an event that seemed a lifetime ago. These weren’t the lunatic flesh-hungry creatures of the distribution hub; these were the necron warrior caste.

Elia shook her head. ‘Doesn’t matter how many of you there are, this rig isn’t stopping.’ She pushed out the throttle and swung the rig across the highway in a swerving arc.

‘Do you mean to–’ began Komeda.

‘I very much mean to,’ snapped Elia, and Adept Komeda immediately began raising the dozer blade to shield the cabin from incoming fire.

Bursts of green light blasted towards them, slamming into the dozer blade and engine cowling. Burning patches of searing green light ate portions of the shielding blade away, and Komeda jerked with every hit as it lurched in its mounting.

Ashen air whistled into the cabin as a stray bolt hit the upper corner of the windscreen.

‘It will not hold!’ yelled Komeda as rippling green spiderwebs ran across the glass, crazing it with an awful creeping light. Nozzle-jets slathered the glass with rapid-hardening resins, but it was too little, too late; they were intended for physical impacts, not xenotech that broke down the very molecular bonds between atoms.

‘It’s going to get a tad windy in here,’ said Elia.

The armoured windscreen shattered, and fragments of hardened glass and resin flew inwards. Elia threw an arm up to protect herself. Tiny razored shards slashed her arm and cut her face open on her forehead and left cheek. Blood dripped into her eye, and she angrily wiped it away.

Blinding vortices of dust billowed in the cabin, freighted with the reek of burned iron and stone. Elia spat a mouthful of ash and snapped a command to Komeda.

‘Lower the blade!’

The dozer blade squealed, off-centre. Metal ground on metal as it dropped to ground level. It threw up sparks as it tore up the roadway, and Elia saw just how close they were to the necrons. Barely thirty metres separated them.

Elia ducked low as more blasts from their weapons zipped and burned past her, striking the stanchions and roof of the cabin. Metal sizzled and cratered inwards as though struck with corrosive chemicals. She glanced up, seeing sky through holes burned above her.

She looked to the roadway in time to see chugging blasts of quad-cannon fire sweep the path ahead, and a dozen necrons vanished in the blitzing storm of hard rounds. Many more remained, still shooting, but the mass of Hellrider was too great for small-arms to have any hope of stopping it. The thundering rig smashed through the necrons, hurling them aside or crushing them beneath its awesome weight. Elia yelled, an incoherent bark of triumph, and punched the roof as dozens of xenos bodies went under the rig, flattened and torn up beneath its wheels.

‘Hellrider!’ she yelled, but the cry died in her throat as she saw buckled hands clawing at the extended engine cowling. A pair of deformed, white-painted faces appeared, portions of their metal skulls half caved in and the light in their eyes flickering like guttering candles. They dragged their shattered bodies towards the mortals within the open cabin, hauling their buckled and broken torsos with bent arms that crawled with green fire as they snapped and popped back into shape.

Elia reached for her laspistol, but the holster was empty. She’d lost it somewhere, but couldn’t remember where.

‘Kyra! Your pistol, give it to me!’ she screamed.

Kyra looked up from the data-slate, saw what was coming in over the cowling, and fumbled for her sidearm. Locked in the rig’s harness, she couldn’t get it free.

The deathly necrons were over the dozer blade. Kyra still couldn’t get her pistol out.

‘Hurry up, damn it!’ yelled Elia.

‘I’m trying!’ yelled Kyra, but Elia saw it wouldn’t matter. Kyra wouldn’t get the weapon to Elia in time.

The necrons pulled themselves up to the frame that once held the windscreen. Their bodies stank of charged metal and something dug up from a water-sodden tomb. They had no voice, but an awful howl filled Elia’s senses, like an overcharged engine on the verge of collapse.

‘Adept! A little help?’ she yelled.

The nearest of the necrons reached for her with needle-like fingers. Fingers she had no doubt could crush her skull in a single convulsive grip. Elia tried to pull back, but the claws caught her shoulder, digging in like knives. She cried out in pain, feeling the cold metal digging down into the meat of her arm to scrape bone.

A blur of silver whipped past her: Komeda’s mechadendrite. Its dataspike punched clean through the necron’s eye socket, and the light in its other eye was snuffed out. Its body went limp, and the claws fell away from Elia’s shoulder.

Tears of pain blurred her vision and she blinked them away, fighting to control her breathing. Komeda tried to pull his mechadendrite from the dead creature’s skull, but before he could draw it back, the second xenos closed its hand on it and tore it from his body. Komeda screamed in pain as galvanic feedback ravaged his already weakened system.

The necron hauled its grotesque torso into the cabin, turning its baleful gaze on Elia.

‘Here!’ yelled Kyra, thrusting her arm out.

Elia snatched the pistol from Kyra’s outstretched hand and placed it hard against the necron’s skull.

‘Get off my rig,’ she said, and blew its head off. The necron toppled from the rig, green light geysering from its headless body.

Elia holstered the laspistol and risked a glance at her mangled shoulder. Blood pumped from multiple deep slashes and she could already feel her arm growing cold and numb.

‘Adept?’ she hissed. ‘Are you still with us? Adept?’

Komeda grunted and jerked in his seat, lifting his head from his chest as though waking from a deep sleep.

‘Affirmative,’ said the tech-priest, his voice dull and listless, yet sounding more human than Elia had heard in the short time she’d known him.

‘On any of your limbs, do you have any welding or soldering implants?’

The tech-priest nodded and said, ‘Adept Komeda has such capabilities, but he does not feel up to any complex technological tasks quite yet.’

‘Good,’ said Elia, gritting her teeth as she ripped away the torn fabric of her uniform blouse at her shoulder. ‘Because this is going to be simple. I’m going to need you to cauterise these wounds for me.’

Uriel ducked behind one of the platform’s firing mantlets as a slashing beam of green light tore into the armour of the tanker-trailer behind him. Spalling fragments of disintegrating metal washed over him, as he rolled left and put a mass-reactive burst from his gauntlet through the heart of the necron gunner.

The creature’s torso exploded and its skimmer chassis veered off to smash into the empty plinth of a gigantic statue of an Imperial grandee. Another two swooped in behind it, pulsing bolts of green fire snapping from their shoulder mounts. They were a hideous hybrid of necron warrior and some form of grav-sled skimmer, centauroid things that crawled with sickly green light and necrotic liquids pulsing along their nightmarish bodies. Uriel took aim at the one in front.

A torrent of thudding blasts from the quad-cannon blew it to pieces in a wash of green fire.

‘Fine shooting, Brutus,’ said Uriel.

‘It’s a target-rich environment,’ returned Cyprian, who had proved just as adept with the quad-cannon’s relentless fire as he was with a bolter. Taken from what looked like a Hydra anti-aircraft gun, its power had kept the worst of the necron host at bay for now, but more were converging on them with every passing moment.

Uriel switched his aim to the rear skimmer and fired, but his shots went wide as the tracks of the tanker-trailer hit chunks of debris and swerved to the side. He bit back a curse. He had too little ammo left for misses.

The rig was barrelling through the ruins of what looked like a commercia district. Broken stalls and spinning beams were strewn in the rig’s wake, scaffolding and statuary smashed to pieces with every collision. Broken glass rained down from dangerously leaning towers, and blue oil smoke streamed from the engine plant.

Dozens of fat-bodied skimmers were swarming them like pack predators looking to bring down a wounded prey-beast. Larger vehicles, similar to the palanquins that had brought the dead to the necron flesh-cult, were running figure-of-eight patterns around their careening path through the ruined city, peeling away the armour around the tracks. Uriel feared it wouldn’t be long before the weight of fire would tear the track units apart.

A flash of green light appeared at the rear of the fighting platform, and Uriel ran towards it, knowing what it heralded. A necron warrior stepped through the light, but this wasn’t one of the numerous warrior caste. This was a towering brute of a thing, plated in bronze and mounted on a tripod-like lower body. Searing blades of energy leapt to life on its arms, bathing its crudely painted death mask in a ghoulish radiance.

It leapt forward, inhumanly fast, slashing with its twin blades.

Uriel leapt back and the firing attachment of his boltstorm gauntlet sheared away as it took the brunt of the creature’s attack. He drew his sword and parried the second attack, backing away and using every ounce of skill to keep the creature from disembowelling him. Flames from the rig’s rear cannon billowed behind it. The fight was too near the front of the rig for the inferno cannon to reach. Too close for the autocannons to depress enough to engage the monster.

Uriel was on his own.

It blurted a screech of static at him. He kept backing away, knowing he was running out of room as the thing kept coming at him. Its blows were powerful, deadly accurate. It fought at a pace he simply couldn’t match.

Mass-reactive fire punched into it from above, and Uriel saw Ancient Peleus standing atop the tanker-trailer with his bolter hard into his shoulder. Apothecary Selenus added plunging fire to the fusillade, blasting more shots into its neck, and tearing loose a portion of its gorget.

Good hits, but they slowed it down not at all. Uriel saw the green radiance behind it shimmer with the outline of another one.

A slamming blow to his shoulder guard punished him for his inattention, shearing away a layer of ceramite. Uriel was fighting at the limits of his skill, using every technique Petronius Nero had taught him.

Find space. Make the moment where an opening presents itself.

Its every strike hammered down on him, like an executioner seeking to take a head with one blow. No slashes, no thrusts, only overhead cuts. A fraction of a second later, Uriel saw why.

It’s too tall…

The creature’s tripod legs were pressed together by the shallow width of the fighting platform, artificially raising it up.

Find space. Make the moment.

Uriel ran forward and dived beneath the creature’s legs, rolling onto his feet at its rear. It tried to turn, but was too hemmed in to easily alter its position. Realising its mistake, the creature spun its upper body on a gimbal waist-axis, but Uriel was already moving.

He leapt up, using the fighting platform’s railings to boost him higher, and swept his sword out in a decapitating strike.

‘For Ultramar!’ shouted Uriel as his power sword sheared through its neck.

Driven by the explosive force of his sinew coils, the energised blade was aimed at the gap between the extended gorget Selenus’ shots had blasted clear. He clove his sword into its neck, unleashing the full force of his enhanced musculature. Metal parted, and streamers of bleeding energy spilled from its exposed spinal column.

Its head lolled on machine sinews, eyes spitting green fire. Still it fought back, holding him in place as its claws tore into his armour. Uriel spun his sword around and drove the blade straight down into its chest cavity, wrenching the hilt back and forth to wreak as much harm as possible. The necron howled in fury as green fire erupted from its body. It collapsed as though every link in the chain of its mechanised musculature had suddenly fractured. Uriel dropped back down to the fighting platform as it began to disintegrate, metal limbs flaking and fading as it died.

Uriel spun around in time to block the overhead sweep of the second necron’s energised blades. A tripod leg lashed out and hit him square in the chest, throwing him back along the platform. The plastron of his armour buckled inwards, and the pressure on his body was like a crushing bear hug from a Dreadnought. He slammed into the railings at the front of the platform, hitting them with force enough to tear the bolts loose. The firing mantlet swung out over the roadway flashing past below. Uriel grabbed onto a protruding handle on the tanker-trailer to keep from falling.

Green light flashed around him, energy blasts stitching a path along the metal of the rig and tearing away yet more of the armoured panels around the tracks. A pack of the skimmers was closing in, along with one of the heavier palanquins. Sheets of flame and bolter fire pushed them back. Quad-cannon shells ripped one of the heavy palanquins in half and sent it spinning away.

Uriel hauled himself back onto the platform and rose to his feet. The fire in his chest swelled, blooming with heat as the Primaris organs flooded his system with a cocktail of combat drugs and regenerative balms. Already he felt the cracks in his ribs and bone shield knitting back together. His armour worked with him, reading his physiology through his spinal links and pushing power through its fibre-bundle systems.

He pulled in a long breath as the second necron killer was followed by a third. Like the thing he had just downed, they were horrifyingly fast and lethal. Bolter shots stitched across the body of the nearest from the Space Marines above, but regenerative flames lapped around the creature’s form.

He could fight one more, maybe even beat it, but two…?

The first of the three-legged killer necrons stalked towards Uriel then paused. Its head snapped up, the fire in its eyes focusing on something above and behind him.

Uriel risked a glance, but saw only more burning ruins: a shattered commercia hall, a burning temple filled with fallen statues and the projecting stub of a smashed bridge, the bulk of its span collapsed into the roadway. Behind it all, Anchorage Citadel reared up, tantalisingly close and impossibly far away.

Uriel heard the whipcrack buzz of a passing round the instant before the necron’s head exploded.

Peleus…? No, that was a Stalker-round.

The monster collapsed as a second shot struck its chest. The explosion ripped away one of its arms, and it toppled from the platform even as its systems tried to repair it.

Uriel looked over his shoulder, following the trajectory of the shot, in time to see two figures rise from cover on the ruined stub of the bridge. Their outlines were camo-cloak blurred, but Uriel recognised Adeptus Astartes Scouts when he saw them.

‘Telion…’ said Uriel as the third necron charged forward.

10

‘Now!’ yelled Telion.

With Quietus slung over one shoulder, he and Nicada leapt from the broken stub of the bridge just before the rig passed beneath them. They sailed through the air as if weightless, their camo-cloaks streaming behind them. Time seemed to slow for Telion, and he saw Captain Ventris facing off against the last of the necron death machines. He’d taken out the first one, and the second had fallen to Telion’s unmatched accuracy.

There wasn’t time to take out the third with a Stalker-round.

He thumbed the pins from two krak grenades and counted to three before twisting in the air to hurl them downwards with all his strength.

Both grenades detonated with simultaneous thunderclaps of ear-splitting violence. The third necron death machine split apart from skull to waist, its arms, torso and head obliterated by the tightly focused blasts.

Telion’s boots slammed into the upper surface of the rig-hauler, and his hip exploded with pain. He rolled, losing sight of the eviscerated death machine and Captain Ventris…

And slid over the far edge of the tanker-trailer. No platform beneath, only broken roadway rushing past below. He fell farther, scrambling for handholds before the iron grip of an Astartes gauntlet clamped around his wrist.

‘I’ve got you, old man,’ said a gruffly serious voice, and Telion looked up to see Ancient Peleus holding onto him.

‘Gratitude,’ said Telion.

‘Glad you could join us,’ said Peleus, hauling him up.

Telion nodded, and struggled with what handholds he could find, scrambling onto the top of the tanker-trailer. He looked for Nicada, pleased to see the lad was already up and kneeling, sniper rifle locked in and taking carefully aimed shots. Necron fire flashed around him, but the Scout didn’t so much as flinch.

Telion turned back, and his heart skipped a beat as he saw what had become of the Fourth’s company standard. Its burned edges were ragged, and whipping threads streamed out behind it in the wind.

‘Emperor’s Mercy, Peleus… the banner?’ began Telion, but the words died in his throat as he saw a shimmer of green light reflected on the chrome of the rig-hauler’s exhaust ports. ‘Get down!’ yelled Telion, surging to his feet as a flash of neon-bright green light flew past his head, searing his cheek as it went.

He missed…

Hard on the heels of that thought was the realisation the enemy sniper hadn’t missed at all. He had hit exactly the target he’d intended to kill.

The Ancient toppled like the tallest oak in the forest, felled before its time. A burning hole cored his neck where the Deathmark’s shot had destroyed his throat. He fell back, ramrod straight, dead before he hit the ground.

‘Apothecary!’ roared Telion, looking back to where he’d caught a flash of a white helmet and shoulder guard. ‘Apothecary!’

Uriel heard Telion’s shout, but couldn’t see him.

Someone was hurt, badly by the sound of it, but he didn’t have time to learn what was happening above. Whickering beams of green energy punched into the tanker-trailer and rig, eating away the metal and burning smoking trails through its armour. More of the necron skimmers were closing in.

Uriel kept low, wishing he still had a ranged weapon. Hellrider was hurting, and it was slowing. The smears left on the debris-strewn roadway told Uriel the rig’s reinforced wheels were coming apart, shedding hard curves of vulcanised rubber and throwing up sprays of bright sparks. Worse, the drive plant crackled with green corposant, billowing smoke that was increasingly black and tarry.

Another gout of burning fire streamed from the rear-mounted blister turret. Instead of the signature white flame of an inferno cannon, the fire was deep crimson and edged in black.

Impurities in the tank. A sure sign it had been ruptured and was filling with contaminated air…

Streams of promethium were spilling onto the road behind Hellrider, leaving burning pools of fire in its wake. Only a matter of time until that fire leapt back into the fuel stores…

‘Pasanius!’ said Uriel over the vox. ‘Get out of there. The fuel tank is split.’

‘Not yet!’ returned Pasanius. ‘I can take them out!’

‘Damn it,’ hissed Uriel, edging his way along the shaking platform towards the rear of the rig, leaning in close to the tanker-trailer for balance. The platform was barely attached now, its front portion bent back and held by a single bolt. A combination of necron weaponry, the weight of the death machines and Telion’s grenades had made it dangerously unstable. Snaking lines of green static slithered over the metal guard rails, and flakes of dissolving metal peeled away like cinders from a dying hearth.

Movement caught Uriel’s eye as three of the larger palanquin vehicles swung smoothly in behind the rig, skimming through the fires with graceful ease. The nearest two looked to be transports, their interiors racked with hunched necron warriors suspended in harnesses between the vehicles’ metal ribs. The third was something altogether different, its structural ribs inverted to hold a crackling silver lance that seethed with powerful plasmic energies.

‘Pasanius! Get out of that turret, damn you!’

The transports peeled away, one left, one right, and shimmering orbs of green light swelled behind their prows. Uriel didn’t doubt he’d be facing the necrons within soon enough.

Cursing, he leapt onto the ladder leading to the topside of the tanker-trailer. More green bolts spanked from its armoured flanks. Halfway to the top, a bolt struck his shoulder guard. The impact was ferocious, and Uriel swung on one hand, feet flailing beneath him. He managed to get his boots back on the rungs and kept climbing.

More of the gun-skimmers were surrounding the rig-hauler, and Uriel saw towering, four-legged creatures similar to the devil-machine Taysen had destroyed converging from either side. He saw none of the madness that had infected that machine, only the cold, clinical malice he expected from the necrons. Finally, he swung onto the tanker-trailer’s topside and pulled himself onto the grilled metal walkway running its length. He pushed himself onto his knees and low-scrambled back towards the blister turret.

Through the heat haze surrounding the turret, Uriel saw the towering necron spire, its soaring peak now wreathed in painfully bright light, like the burning tip of an arc-welder. The entire vast length shone with pulsing emerald light, bleeding through its structure to form strange runic sigils like ancient cuneiform. Uriel remembered seeing something similar beneath Pavonis in the moments before the breaking open of the Nightbringer’s tomb. Whatever this thing was, Uriel feared Sycorax was about to learn its dark purpose.

The vanes surrounding its peak were turning, the sound of grinding metal and stone sounding like the earth cracking open.

And then, with a thunderclap of lightning, a dazzling arc of sickly yellow-green light exploded from the spire to pierce the sky like a blazing spear. Uriel shielded his eyes, looking skyward and trying to identify its target.

The Vae Victus? Was the spire defending itself against another orbital strike?

The coruscating beam scorched the sky, impossibly bright and bleaching the world of colour. Its radiance burned orders of magnitude brighter than the clearest day the planet had ever seen. Heat bloom rippled over the city, scorching stone, melting steel and banishing shadows.

A voice spoke from his earpiece, breaking the hypnotic sight of booming detonations and secondary eruptions spreading from the spire.

‘Captain Ventris,’ said the voice again, bereft of emotion and utterly calm.

Telion’s voice.

Uriel ignored him; he had to get to Pasanius. He looked back to the rear of the rig as he heard the telltale shrieking whoosh of volatile fuel/air mix igniting.

The rear blister turret exploded in an expanding sphere of red flame and smoke. The searing shockwave blasted Uriel back, slamming him into the firing step. His vision swam and his throat burned with the acrid toxins filling the air. Veils of burning fuel hung overhead, and blazing gobbets of jelly-like promethium fell in a fiery rain. Uriel’s legs and chest were spotted with flames, and he slapped them out in a daze before his mind reasserted control.

He pulled himself to his feet as crushing grief stabbed into his heart. Nothing remained of the rear turret, only a splintered cupola mount and ruptured fuel lines spraying gouts of fire behind the tanker-trailer. The entire back third of the tanker-trailer was aflame now, choking clouds of dense black smoke funnelling in its wake.

‘Imperator… no…’ said Uriel, taking a step forwards. ‘Pasanius!’

‘Captain Ventris,’ said Telion again. ‘It is imperative that you stay absolutely still.’

Custom round chambered, potential target location procedurally range-locked.

Telion’s augmetic eye was glued to the scope of Quietus. In the middle of battle, that was foolish; target fixation when enemy fire was enfilading was about as certain a way to get killed as it was possible to imagine. But this was no normal engagement, and the Deathmark no normal foe.

He’d duelled enemy snipers countless times over his centuries of service: aeldari who moved like ghosts, Bloodborn infiltrators and t’au warriors whose armour camouflaged them in refracted light. He’d even encountered a few greenskins on Black Reach whose low cunning surprised him.

The world was fire and noise from the concussive force of the quad-cannon shells and the searing light of the spire. He knew small-arms fire from the necron skimmers was flashing past, lethally close. He heard the rack-hiss-rack of Nicada’s sniper rifle returning fire. Telion blocked it all out, his entire focus down his rifle’s scope. Its gain was dialled all the way down to compensate for the shockingly bright light washing over the city, but even so, the image was washed-out, grainy and heat-hazed. Not great, but he’d made kills in worse conditions.

The building in the rifle’s scope was a fire-blasted ruin, a squat hab-block at least thirty degrees off its vertical axis, and only still upright thanks to the steel-framed structure of an adjacent graving yard it had fallen against.

As braced a structure as you could find in Port Setebos these days.

He kept the barrel of his rifle steady, locking his knees and leaving his pelvis loose like a gimbal mount. His wounded hip burned with the effort of holding the firing position steady on the back of the juddering rig. Stabbing flares of heat pulsed up through his spine and into his shoulders. His armour kept trying to flood the area with pain suppressors, but Telion denied them for they would only dull his perceptions.

The roadway curved ahead, turning west to run between the two structures, and the rig-hauler would pass beneath the triangular arch the hab-block’s fallen facade formed with the graving yard in a little under twenty seconds. He’d calculated the angles, worked in their approach speed…

If I were up there, aiming down at this rig, when would I fire?

After the turn, when the target was approaching on a parallel path to the shot.

Telion’s thought processes moved like lightning, as fast as his breathing was slow. The double-beating of his heart was deliberately calm, barely more than if he had taken a knee on the Chapter parade ground. To push your surroundings away, no matter how chaotic, and let yourself become one with the shot you were about to take took unimaginable skill, patience and experience.

Few men could do it. He’d met female snipers of the Militarum and some ratlings who could master such detachment, but most mortals were simply incapable of preventing fear and external stimuli from affecting their awareness and fouling their shot.

The rig-hauler began its turn, and Telion counted down the range in his head.

Two thousand metres – no target.

Most snipers died because they got greedy, too eager for a second shot instead of displacing to set up in a secondary position. The Deathmark would not make that mistake. It could translate into the physical world the instant before it took its shot and phase out immediately after making its kill.

Fifteen hundred metres – no target.

Telion had to anticipate his foe, but that required knowing what it was going to shoot at.

One thousand metres – no target… Damn it, where are you? What had he missed? Where else would it be?

No. The time for doubt is gone. Commit.

Telion’s crosshair remained in place, and he eased out a breath, knowing what a terrible risk he was taking in giving the Deathmark such a tempting target.

‘Captain Ventris,’ said Telion. ‘It is imperative that you stay absolutely still.’

He sighted on the optimal position for an enemy to take a kill shot on the Fourth Company’s captain.

Eight hundred metres – no target.

Telion squeezed the trigger, and Quietus bucked softly into his shoulder.

Control reasserted itself.

The emotional centre of Uriel’s brain locked up, overruled by the prefrontal cortex. The Rubicon Primaris had sharpened his perceptions, altering his thought patterns and enhancing its speed of connection. An Astartes mind was driven by battlefield realities and available information, a Primaris mind exponentially more so.

Every instinct of brotherhood was urging him to run towards the fire and help his friend, but the cold, logical part of his mind told him Pasanius was already dead. Telion’s words lodged in his mind.

It is imperative that you stay absolutely still.

Ordinarily that would be the height of stupidity, but Telion had earned the trust of every warrior of the Ultramarines a thousand times over. If the Eye of Vengeance made a declaration, it was to be obeyed.

Uriel took this moment of motionlessness to study the ebb and flow of this fight. It had moments left at best. The rear of the tanker was on fire, and it would surely only be a matter of moments until the heat breached the promethium reservoir within. Heavy skimmers were systematically peeling back the rig’s armour with blizzards of green energy bolts, and its wheels were little more than bare rims throwing off great fans of sparks, like a chainsword cutting through steel.

Uriel looked over his shoulder as he became aware of a soft green light.

Shimmering around his head like a halo.

Telion’s enhanced senses followed the flare of his round’s rocket motor.

Bolter shells were designed for close-range brawls waged in zero gravity by lumbering warriors in primitive suits of power armour during the earliest days of the Great Crusade. By igniting after clearing the barrel, the full power of the shell didn’t transfer its brutal recoil to the shooter.

It took fractionally less than a second for Telion’s shot to reach its intended target.

At eight hundred metres on a closing, flat trajectory, the shell exhibited no drop in its flight path and flew straight and true.

Towards nothing.

Telion’s heart sank, knowing he had just allowed the Fourth Company captain to be killed.

The image in his scope blurred, twisted. Green light flared, a burst of displaced air and debris.

A slender figure appeared on the ledge Telion would have chosen for his own shot, had their roles been reversed. Its singular eye burned a focused green.

Its head inclined towards Telion and he had a fractional moment to savour its disbelief before the Stalker-pattern bolt-round blew its metal skull apart.

The headless body collapsed, drawn back into its otherworldly vortex.

Telion let out a shuddering breath and painfully slid down to his haunches, cradling Quietus in his lap. He saw Uriel Ventris staring at him, and knew the captain was fully aware of what he’d done, how Telion had used him as bait.

The captain of the Fourth nodded.

‘Good shot, sergeant,’ he said.

Uriel turned and low-crawled into the fire billowing around the rear of the tanker-trailer, swaying in time with its motion as it slewed from side to side. The rear tracks were all but destroyed, and it was an effort to stay upright. The rig weaved an erratic path across the roadway, slamming into necron skimmers that came too close and crushing them beneath its bare steel rims. That Elia Vivaro had kept the rig going as long as she had was surely deserving of a commendation.

Zipping bolts of green flashed around him, but he paid them no heed. All his attention was focused on where the blister turret had once sat.

Nothing remained, at least nothing recognisable. Only the shredded, molten remains of its rotator mechanism was still intact, together with the twin fuel feeds that spewed liquid flame like severed arteries. He could see no sign of Pasanius through the choking smoke and sheets of fire. Uriel dropped to one knee, scanning the debris filling the roadway behind the rig-hauler. The thought of his dearest friend’s body left abandoned somewhere far behind them filled him with a towering fury.

Through the flames, Uriel saw the skeletal cargo of one of the necron transports winking out, and a bronzed figure stepped through the flames. Its gleaming metal body was red and gold with reflected fire. Green light shone in its eyes. Another appeared in a burst of green light beside him, two more shimmering into existence behind and before him.

Uriel surged to his feet, hammering his fist out to crush the chest of the first necron warrior. It dropped and a second took its place, swinging the bladed barrel of its weapon. It bit into the metal of Uriel’s armour, but he made a quarter-turn to his left and hammered his fist into its face. It fell from the rig, smashing into pieces as it landed.

Another threw itself at him, tearing at his neck, iron-hard fingers stabbing into the soft meat of his throat. Uriel hammered his elbow back to break its hold and bent over to throw it over his shoulder. He kept hold of its arm, and twisted it violently to the side. The metal cracked and green light spilled out. He hauled the creature to its feet and slammed it into the others as close-range fire blitzed around him.

He hurled the dissolving necron’s body away, keeping in close.

This was not a battle of finesse or skill, but an up-close and personal street brawl fought in the heart of an inferno. Too close for sword work, Uriel dragged out his combat blade and laid about himself like a pit-fighter. Hard chops of his forearm, stamping kicks to knee joints, quick-fire stabs with the blade.

Thrust, twist, move.

They fought him with a fury he’d not seen in the necrons. No drudging robots these, but frenzied killers intent on his death.

Pain flared in his side as a blast of alien gunfire flayed a portion of his armour and skin. Hooked fingers stabbed his flank, gouging the hard flesh beneath his bodyglove and black carapace. The heat of the fires scorched the wound, sealing it even before his inhuman clotting mechanisms.

A metalled skull slammed into his face, and he saw red for an instant.

He jammed his knife in its eye. The necron fell back, tearing the blade from his hand.

More point-blank shots, more pain, but he fought through it all. The biological furnace in his chest blazed, ancient gene-tech pouring near-limitless power into his limbs. Steel sinews delivered thunderous blows with absurdly short travel distances, combat-stimms heightened his awareness to preternatural levels. Uriel moved like never before, faster and more flexible than ought to be possible. His body was like smoke, twisting away from killing strikes, swaying aside from disembowelling blows. In return, he smashed skulls, snapped limbs like twigs and ripped out pulsing light from shattered ribcages with every strike.

I am Primaris!

But for every necron he killed, more were appearing through the flames. Twisting corposant from their teleportation wreathed them like smoke.

A searing bolt of white-green light speared from the vehicle with the crackling silver lance held within its inverted structural ribs. Uriel threw himself towards the centre of the tanker-trailer as its rear section was obliterated, tearing away the rearmost track unit. The tanker-trailer lurched to the side, tipping over to where Uriel felt sure it must overturn, and half a dozen necron warriors were thrown off to be dashed on the roadway. Uriel gripped the perforations in the grilled walkway to keep from suffering the same fate.

The rig-hauler turned into the lurching movement in a feat of incredible control, and the tanker-trailer slammed back down again. Uriel scrambled to his feet as yet more necron warriors stepped through the wall of flames in flares of teleport energies.

With no tracks at the rear, the tanker-trailer was dead weight, a sloping mass of broken steel. Uriel backed away towards the front of the trailer as he saw the swirling plasmic energies coalescing around the searing tip of the lance weapon once more. The necrons followed, hunched metal revenants hungry for death.

The instant before the vehicle’s weapon fired, the rig’s mechanisms howled in protest as Elia Vivaro slammed on the pneumatic brakes and threw down the wheel-locks. Bare steel rims ground on the roadway as Hellrider’s speed dropped precipitously and it screeched across the roadway in a wide, desperate skid.

The necron vehicle slammed into the trailer just as its weapon discharged directly into the tanker-trailer’s rear, and both exploded in a blinding sphere of white-hot energies. Searing flames billowed up the length of the tanker-trailer, incinerating the necrons still standing and leaving a blinding negative after-image on Uriel’s retinas. The impact threw Uriel from the top of the tanker-trailer, over the portside fighting platform. The world spun around, a confusion of light and dark.

The roadway rushed up to meet him. Steel-rimmed wheels spun towards Uriel like blades, and not even his Primaris physique would save him.

A blue-plated gauntlet snapped out to grab his wrist in an iron grip and he seized upon it. The momentum of his fall swung him around like a pendulum, but another warrior was there to catch him.

Petronius Nero.

Nero grabbed his armour and grunted as he hauled Uriel over the guard rails of what remained of the portside fighting platform. The Company Champion’s armour was shredded with weapon impacts and his helmet was gone. His patrician features spoke of hard fighting.

‘I have you, captain,’ said his Company Champion.

Uriel nodded in gratitude and took a moment to get his breath. He turned to see who had first caught him and let out a relieved sigh.

‘Pasanius,’ he said between heaving draughts of hot air. ‘I thought you dead…’

His friend’s armour was scorched black on its right side, the paint seared away to silver. One side of his face was terribly burned, the skin crimson-black and wet, his right eye a gelatinous ruin of weeping fluids.

‘I took my time getting out,’ admitted Pasanius. ‘Leapt away when things got too hot and Nero here was good enough to break my fall.’

‘Broke my damn helmet crest,’ said Nero bitterly.

Another explosion ripped up the length of the tanker-trailer. Despite every braking mechanism, the rig-hauler was still moving at high speed. And this time there was no saving it. The vehicle’s skid grew more extreme, the dead weight of its tanker-trailer arcing around and over, beyond any hope of correction.

‘I think our ride is over,’ said Nero with implacable calm.

Everything spun around: the road, the rig, the blazing sky, the smoking ruins on either side. A rotating kaleidoscope of stone, steel, fire and smoke.

Half a second later, Hellrider slammed into the outer redoubts of Anchorage Citadel.

11

Blood and dust was gumming Elia’s eyes.

She reached up to wipe it away. Pain shot up her arm and into her shoulder, drawing a curse and tears that cut through the grime on her cheeks. She winced, coughing as she blinked enough moisture to see, feeling blistering heat and the ache of a dozen injuries across her body. She tried to get her bearings and fight through the ringing hammer blows inside her head.

Hellrider was on its side, the crew compartment buckled inwards across from her, its structure crumpled by the force of the impact. Flames licked up over the engine cowling, and gritty smoke was gathering inside. Explosions and gunfire echoed outside, made dull and distant by concussion.

Adept Komeda lay in front of her, slumped over the instrument panel with his snake-like mechadendrites hanging limply over his shoulders and around his side. Blood and a viscous, amber liquid dribbled from beneath his hood.

‘Adept Komeda?’ said Elia. ‘Are you still with me?’

He didn’t reply and she feared the worst.

Elia strained to look over her shoulder and said, ‘Kyra, talk to me. Are you alive?’

Her friend groaned. ‘Elia, I’m hurt. I think my leg’s broken.’

‘You’re alive though, thank the Emperor for that! And Vigo? Is he…?’

Kyra’s voice cracked as she said, ‘He’s gone, Elia… Oh, Imperator, I think he’s gone.’

Vigo grunted and shook his head. ‘Not…yet, I’m not…’

Elia let out an amazed laugh. ‘You grenadiers are a tough lot to kill, eh?’

‘Doesn’t… stop the… galaxy from… trying,’ he snapped.

‘Right,’ said Elia, pushing down her initial panic. ‘Here’s what’s happening. I’m getting out of this harness, and then I’ll help the rest of us get the hell out of this rig. You hear me?’

She didn’t wait for an answer and fumbled with the harness release mechanism, attempting to brace herself before turning and lifting the lock-latch. It didn’t work, and she fell painfully onto the central gear-shift divider. Agonising bolts shot up her arms and spine: compression injuries and whiplash. Maybe she blacked out for a second, she couldn’t be sure. The heat was growing intolerable, the metal inside the cab almost too hot to touch.

‘Kyra, can you get your harness off?’

‘I think so,’ said Kyra, her voice full of pain.

‘Be careful, we’re on our side. The rig tipped over when we crashed.’

‘Told you,’ said Kyra. ‘Just like Volcua III. You never can keep a vehicle straight.’

‘I’m never going to hear the end of this, am I?’

‘Not in this lifetime.’

Elia didn’t say that the span of this lifetime might very well be measured in minutes. Instead, she wriggled and twisted to get her legs under her. Bullets of pure agony flared the length of her back, and it was all she could do to keep from screaming.

But eventually she got her legs planted and squirmed around to Kyra and Vigo. Both were held in place by their harnesses, and one after the other, she bore their weight as they unlatched themselves. Kyra’s left leg was drenched in blood from the knee down, her shin bent at an angle no leg was ever meant to bend. Though Elia couldn’t see it, a bulge just above the ankle told her the bone was jutting through Kyra’s flesh.

‘Yeah, your leg’s broken,’ said Elia, ‘but nothing a decent medicae can’t fix.’

Vigo’s uniform was stiff with blood, the bandages wrapped around his chest and waist soaked in crimson. His skin, normally so rich and dark, was a hideous shade of mottled grey.

‘Damn, Vigo, how are you even alive?’ said Elia.

‘You said it yourself… I’m a grenadier,’ said Vigo. ‘I got caffeine and fyceline for blood, and I piss promethium.’

Elia grinned. ‘Vigo, I’m getting you out first,’ she said. ‘Then I’ll come back for you, Kyra, right?’

Kyra nodded, but before Elia could move, a pair of shadows moved at the broken window of the rig. Silhouettes, too bulky for one of the necrons.

Space Marines, but not ones she knew.

The first had a face that was disconcertingly youthful on a body physically enhanced far beyond even the strongest soldier in the Astra Militarum. The second had the full bulk of an Astartes warrior, but his armour was lighter than the others. His white-bearded face was riven by deep lines of age and experience, and he carried a long-barrelled weapon slung at his back.

‘Who are you?’ said Elia.

‘I’m Telion,’ he barked, holding out his hand. ‘Give them to me.’

‘They’re hurt bad,’ said Elia.

‘They’ll be dead if you don’t give them to me now, lass,’ said Telion.

Elia nodded, and pulled Vigo towards the Space Marine as an explosion shook the compartment. Vigo grunted in pain as Telion folded his grip under his shoulder.

‘Nicada. Take them,’ he said, pulling the wounded man out.

The younger warrior took Vigo, and Kyra crawled towards him, biting her lip to keep from screaming in pain. Nicada bent and effortlessly lifted her clear, his hand around her waist and her arm wrapped around his neck.

‘Your turn, lass,’ said Telion, beckoning her out. Flashes of green light reflected from the plates of his armour.

‘What about Adept Komeda?’

He nodded his battered face towards the tech-priest. ‘Is the Martian still alive?’

Komeda’s head snapped up, and a distorted version of his voice crackled from his throat. More of the amber lubricant blood dribbled from his throat.

‘Adept Komeda would have you know the term Martian is inaccurate. His planet of inception is Triplex Phall.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Telion. ‘Can you move?’

‘Adept Komeda’s motor functions are impaired, but yet functional. Though perhaps a little help might accomplish this extraction quicker?’

Between them, Telion and Elia were able to work Komeda free from his seat and disentangle him from the loops of cabling spilling from the consoles. They dragged him from Hellrider’s wreckage, grunting with the effort. His weight was astonishing, like trying to manoeuvre the stanchion of a pontoon bridge into place.

‘Throne!’ said Elia ‘How much of you is metal?’

‘Seventy-four point three per cent of Adept Komeda’s body mass is a mix of metals, rubber and plastic,’ said Komeda, sounding forlorn. ‘It would be understandable if you chose to leave and save yourselves…’

Elia took a deep breath of smoke and burned metal. The tanker-trailer was almost entirely destroyed, and what was left of it was aflame. She looked up to see the soaring ramparts, bronzed gate and blocky towers of Anchorage Citadel’s abandoned outer walls.

‘Not a chance,’ said Elia between hissing breaths. ‘Didn’t I already tell you? Caen Pioneers always bring their machines home.’

Uriel stood over the body of Ancient Peleus with his surviving warriors as the necron forces moved to surround them. The xenos marched in eerie unison or stepped from smears of light that warped in and out of focus. Skimmers drifted in close, wary of any potential wall defences.

Vox was dead, only a skirling of sing-song interference and static from the searing beam lancing from the spire into the sky. The earth shook with booming tremors, and Uriel wondered if a twin to the colossal tower was set to rip up from somewhere in the city.

Telion’s Scout appeared from the smoke, dragging Kyra Vance and Vigo Tengger from Hellrider’s wreckage. The master Scout sergeant limped behind him, with Elia Vivaro helping him bear the weight of Adept Komeda.

Uriel nodded and said, ‘Swords of Calth. Form on me.’

Petronius Nero took position to Uriel’s right, his sword bared and pistol drawn. Next to Nero was Selenus, his Apothecary’s duty of care to his brothers now at an end. In this moment he was, once again, a warrior first and foremost. Brutus Cyprian held the meltagun of Livius Hadrianus, its charge light blinking an angry red. Perhaps one shot remained, if even that. Pasanius took position on Uriel’s left with his bolter held at his side, a broken combat blade held in his cybernetic arm.

‘Just like old times,’ said Uriel, keeping an eye on the advancing necrons.

‘No,’ said Pasanius. ‘It’s not. You and I? The Imperium? Things are very different now, but one thing is unchanged. You are, and will always be, my oldest and dearest friend.’

Uriel nodded, too overcome with the brotherhood Pasanius so freely offered. He had no words to match their sincerity, and simply said, ‘Bad odds.’

A host of death-mask faces, white-painted to resemble skulls, fixed upon them, their green eyes glimmering with alien malevolence.

‘You remember what I said to you on Medrengard?’ said Pasanius.

Uriel shook his head.

‘You take the ten on the right and I’ll take the ten on the left,’ said Pasanius.

Uriel chuckled and held out his hand. Pasanius took it, his grip unbreakable.

‘Courage and honour, my friend,’ said Uriel, raising his sword.

Pasanius shouldered his bolter and reversed the grip on his blade. ‘Courage and honour.’

Another booming tremor shook the ground, swiftly followed by another. And Uriel was able to tell that this was no subterranean seismic event, but something vast impacting on the surface. The sound came again, a heavy footfall, followed by the groaning scrape of massive gears, heavy pistons and vast hydraulics.

The outer gates of Anchorage Citadel fell outwards in a splintered rain of wreckage. Heavy stone, marble frescoes and reinforcing steelwork fell in a churning avalanche of debris. Twisted rebar spars spun away like iron splinters and vortices of ionised air were drawn up as something loomed out of the gate’s destruction. Silhouetted against the too-bright sky, it had the outline of a pugilist spoiling for a fight. It pushed through the wreckage it had made of the gate, and the noise of its mechanisms was what Uriel imagined a forge world might sound like if given voice.

‘God-engine…’ said Brutus Cyprian as Lucius Pretorian of Legio Astorum loosed a braying challenge from its war-horn. Its armour was blue and gold; its heraldic black eclipse flew proudly from its carapace, snapping back and forth in the clashing electrostatic wavefronts rippling off its voids.

The engine took a step beyond the walls, and the ground trembled. Masonry and iron bounced at the weight of it. Another step, and the Reaver’s splay-clawed foot crashed down ten metres behind the Space Marines. Another stride would bring it level with them.

The Reaver rolled its shoulders, and seemed to stoop. The space beneath its carapace echoed with squealing gears as it raised its banner-hung weapons. Auto-loaders shucked explosive shells into its gatling cannon and the enormous powercells of its mass lasers shrieked as they achieved a firing charge.

‘Get down!’ shouted Uriel, diving to the ground as Lucius Pretorian tilted its armoured head slightly to the side in anticipation of the fight.

And opened fire.

The lasers sawed from left to right, and the space before the citadel became a roiling hell of incandescent fire straight from the heart of a sun. The air screamed as it ignited and the road burned away, turning the bedrock beneath to blackened glass.

Caught in the unimaginable fury of its guns, the warrior necrons nearest to the engine were instantly vaporised to cindered flakes of ash. The skimmers and the last remaining vehicles tried to retreat, but Lucius Pretorian was unstinting in its merciless fury. Mass laser fire eviscerated them in blizzards of green lightning. Backwashing fires surged in a suffocating wave, sucking the local oxygen to them with their ferocious appetite to burn.

Then the gatling cannon unleashed the full force of its divine wrath.

Uriel had never been this close to a wrathful Titan, and never wanted to be again. The point-blank noise of its cannon was like standing too close to a Thunderhawk performing an emergency extraction in a hot landing zone. It was impossible to pick out individual shell blasts, only an unceasing roar of destruction that seemed like it would never end. Spent shells fell from its ejection port in a glittering golden cascade, each red-hot and the size of Uriel’s forearm.

The few structures built around the perimeter of the citadel were levelled in a heartbeat, fortified gunboxes, abandoned redoubts and crumbling outworks reduced to atoms. Explosions tore the ground to shreds, and the vitrified bedrock blew out like shrapnel mines loaded with millions of hardened, razor-edged shards of glass. The pressure wave smashed the wreckage of Hellrider, and Uriel’s last sight of the rig-hauler was its shattered remains tumbling away into the fire.

And then it was over, the sudden silence shocking after such violence. Uriel lifted his head to see a hellscape of utter destruction, turning back to Anchorage as he heard the throaty roar of Imperial tanks. Moments later, the battle-damaged Land Raider Heart of Stone rumbled over the smashed remains of the gate, closely followed by a dozen vehicles emblazoned with the regimental crest of the 161st Caen Pioneer and Construction Battalion. The Militarum vehicles were equipped with wide dozer blades, and swiftly ploughed the earth to form a crescent-shaped earthwork at the rear of the Titan. Carapace-armoured soldiers deployed with combat mantlets and field fortifications, gunners deployed crew-served weapons, and artillery observers were sighting in the citadel’s distant gun batteries.

Within thirty seconds, they had a secure position and medicae personnel were moving to secure the wounded Militarum soldiers within the ranks of the Space Marines. The Ultramarines of Guardian Squad deployed from the Land Raider, and despite their protests, Uriel ordered Telion and Nicada to withdraw with them. The veteran Scout sergeant was barely able to stand, and Nicada would not leave his side.

A choppy, hazed sound in Uriel’s ear buzzed like a trapped insect, and it took him a moment to realise it was a voice speaking directly to him. A prefix-code told him the transmission was coming from the Battle Titan.

‘Captain Ventris?’

‘Sergeant Learchus? Are you aboard the Titan?’

‘I am,’ replied Learchus. ‘Now, if you will pardon my brevity, I need you and the Swords of Calth to board Lucius Pretorian immediately.’

At first, Uriel thought he’d misheard; Space Marines had no business within a Battle Titan.

‘Come aboard? Why?’ he said, pushing himself to his feet as the engine straightened from its firing stoop to its full, towering height. Rungs extended from the back of its column-like legs and a boarding hatch irised open just beneath its thrumming plasma reactor.

‘Because Princeps Ubrique tells me the entire star system will soon be destroyed and this is our only chance to stop that from happening.’

Uriel had gone into battle in a host of Imperial vehicles: Rhinos, Land Raiders, drop pods, boarding torpedoes and Thunderhawks as well as other, less Codex-approved transports, but until now he had never set foot within a god-engine of the Collegia Titanica.

The spaces within were manifestly not designed with transhuman bulk in mind, and the Astartes warriors who boarded with him had to be dispersed throughout its superstructure. The interior reeked of heavy grease, scented lubricants and the crisp tang of unshielded electrical cabling. Veils of incense drifted from ceiling-mounted censers on brass chains that swayed with the engine’s striding motion.

Hooded servitors bowed their shaven, implant-heavy skulls to Komeda and pressed themselves into impossibly tight spaces to allow them passage as cyber-spyders scuttled through the ductwork on missions of repair and maintenance. Every nook and cranny not taken up by ancient machineries was inscribed with catechisms honouring the Omnissiah, bronze plaques of binaric prayers or reliquary-boxes holding the circuit-inscribed skulls of former members of the engine’s crew.

At Ubrique’s request, Uriel and Komeda climbed the near-vertical companionways towards Lucius Pretorian’s command bridge. Ascending the interior of a moving Titan required skill and careful timing, for the swaying motion of the engine made every hand and foothold a moving target. And the noise! The ratcheting clamour of hydraulic gears, rattling chains and magnificent pneumatics filled the engine’s interior with the music of heavy machinery, a symphony of iron and oil only those touched by the Machine-God could ever truly appreciate. And with every staggered level they ascended through the engine’s mechanised guts, the booming echoes of binaric plainsong grew louder, as did the bellicose growling that seemed to emanate from the enclosing steel bulkheads.

Being within the body of one of his order’s god-machines was revitalising Komeda. This was a holy place to him, and despite his many hurts, the adept’s hooded features were alive with reverence and awe. He climbed ahead of Uriel, eager to reach the command deck, where the union of flesh, metal and electromotive force reached its zenith. They climbed out of darkness towards the light, and finally entered Lucius Pretorian’s command bridge.

Unlike the driver’s compartment of a Land Raider or Rhino, it was surprisingly spacious: a vaulted chancel hung with flame-retardant devotional banners and filled with the sickly aroma of blessed oils and metallic tinctures steaming on candle-warmed bowls.

A pair of androgyne twins sat in sunken connection berths at the tapered prow of the bridge, bathed in the blinding glow emanating from the necron spire through the engine’s armaglass eye slits. Each was clad in the blue and gold of Legio Astorum, and bore the iconography of Lucius on one breast, their Legio’s black eclipse on the other. Hardwired into the engine’s systems, the moderati were the engine’s fire and fury.

But the heart and brain was its princeps.

Fabricatus – now Princeps – Ubrique reclined upon a padded throne of blue-black adamantium edged with gold and surrounded by a haze of noospheric data screens. Her robes of ivory and jet were carefully folded to allow myriad cables, plugs and spinal connectors access to her biomechanical form, through which she conjoined with the manifold of the god-machine and walked it towards the heart of Port Setebos.

Her human eye was closed, the pupil darting back and forth like a sleeper in the throes of a lucid dream, while the green gem eye set within her half-porcelain mask flickered with voluminous quantities of inloads from the engine’s external augurs. Her servo-harness still bore the gently rotating sun-globe of circuit-etched gold above her head, though now it was connected to the workings of the Titan by a web of heat-shielded cables. It burned painfully bright, as though absorbing vast quantities of energy. It pulsed in time with Ubrique’s heartbeat and filled the command bridge with light.

‘Welcome aboard Lucius Pretorian, Captain Ventris,’ she said. ‘And welcome to you as well, Adept Komeda.’

Like the prayers and plainsong from the passageways below, her voice came from everywhere and nowhere, stronger than Uriel remembered, empowered by the awesome forces bound within the very fabric of the god-engine.

‘I am honoured,’ said Uriel, bracing himself against a projecting stanchion as the god-engine marched through the city.

‘More than you know. To enter this space is to know divinity.’

Uriel didn’t know how to answer that, but Ubrique wasn’t done.

‘Adept Komeda,’ she said. ‘What is your current operational efficiency?’

‘Regretfully, I am suboptimal, fabricatus,’ said Komeda, and it took Uriel a moment to register that the adept had referred to himself in the first person. ‘My adventures in the field have degraded my onboard systems somewhat, but they are realigning as we speak. I stand before you at sixty-three per cent efficiency.’

‘Not optimal, not sub-par,’ commented Ubrique. ‘I am currently operating as princeps and enginseer, therefore I require you to immediately situate within the tech-priest’s station.’

Komeda’s spine straightened, and Uriel could practically feel his excitement.

‘It would be my honour, my princeps!’ said the adept with a reverential bow, before retreating to a recessed chamber at the rear of the compartment and climbing onto a circular plinth. Its front panels slid back to admit him, and as he stepped inside, whirring cables descended, slithering under his hood to interface with his numerous implant sockets.

‘Fair warning, Komeda,’ said Ubrique. ‘Lucius Pretorian is a hellion of a machine-spirit, she will take every opportunity to unseat you.’

‘Understood,’ said Komeda, as the panels slid back to enfold him from the chest down and the last of the cables plugged into his spine.

‘I am inloading the data sets you will need to manage the nuclear heart of Lucius Pretorian,’ explained Ubrique. ‘Schematics, fusion formulae and plasmic load balances. It takes years to train as a Titan enginseer, but we do not have years. We have hours at most.’

Immediately, Komeda’s body spasmed and a thin line of spittle drooled from the corner of his mouth. A whimper escaped his lips and his eyes flashed with an onrush of technical data.

‘What is the current situation?’ said Uriel. ‘What do I need to know?’

‘Ah, Captain Ventris, so many things, but the heart of the matter is this. As I am sure you have divined, we are marching through the ruins of Port Setebos towards the upthrust spire at the heart of this city. The necrons are attacking, but do not yet have any firepower or engine-scale constructs that concern me. But, first things first, understand this – the spire is emphatically not a weapon, at least insofar as destruction is not its primary purpose.’

‘It is not engaging our fleet assets?’

‘No.’

Relief washed over Uriel, knowing the Vae Victus was not in immediate danger.

That relief was short-lived as Ubrique continued. ‘But if we do not end the spire’s operation, every living thing in this star system will be annihilated.’

‘Why? What is it doing?’

‘Available biographical data tells me you were born on Calth, so you will be familiar with the history of how its star’s radiation was corrupted,’ said Ubrique in that strangely sourceless voice. ‘What is happening here is not entirely dissimilar to what forces of the Archenemy did then, except the necrons are not poisoning the star, they are bleeding it dry. Every augur confirms my hypothesis that the spire is a hyper-efficient energy siphon. Seven minutes after activation, its beam pierced the heart of the Sycorax star and moments later heliocentric relay stations registered a precipitous drop in the thermonuclear fusion energies being generated within its heart.’

‘Which means the spire is depleting the star’s energy at an unimaginable rate,’ said Uriel.

‘Indeed, and sooner rather than later, that depletion will cause a core collapse, resulting in the ejection of the star’s outer layers and waves of gravitational potential energy powerful enough to engulf every planet in this system, scorching away their atmospheres and ripping apart their surfaces in global seismic events. Nothing living will survive.’

Uriel had seen first-hand the aftermath of Exterminatus, and the memories haunted him to this day. To imagine that level of global catastrophe played out over an entire system sent a chill of horror down his spine.

‘So if the destruction is not the primary purpose of the spire, what is it for?’

One of Ubrique’s noospheric screens assumed visual clarity and slid towards Uriel. It displayed a planetary map he recognised from the many months he had pored over it during the war against the greenskins. There, on the bottom right was the isthmus where Port Setebos straddled the land between the oceans. He saw Medea Ridge to the north where Captain Fabian’s ill-fated attack had faltered in the face of the greenskins’ ferocity. The memory of that defeat still gave every warrior in the Chapter pause to reflect on the vagaries of war and how the fickle tides of battle could turn on the most seemingly insignificant detail.

The map zoomed in on one of its western quadrants, focusing on the lone peak of Mount Shokereth, its dense contours tightly gathered on the east and south, more spaced to the north and west. The mine workings and surrounding facilities destroyed by the greenskins had been rebuilt, picked out in a mix of Imperial aquilas and toothed Icons Mechanicus.

‘The eagles circle the mountain once more,’ said Uriel, remembering similar words coming out of Komeda’s mouth when the adept had hooked into the Variava Station manifold.

‘Quite,’ said Ubrique. ‘And extrapolating out the assumed constant curvature of the spire, would you care to wager on where the power being drained is being directed?’

‘Beneath Mount Shokereth.’

‘Exactly correct, and in the last hour, orbital surveyors have detected the presence of a hitherto undiscovered arcology beneath the mountain, vast beyond anything I have ever seen. Previously shielded from our surveyors, but impossible to miss now it is powering up.’

‘More necrons?’ said Uriel.

‘Yes, but the overwhelming majority of signs point to a human presence. The sheer mass of bio-signatures leads me to believe this is where the civilian inhabitants captured by the necrons have been taken, all fifteen million of them.’

The map showing Mount Shokereth lit up with bio-signs, so many that they overwhelmed the map with their light.

‘I have seen this before,’ said Uriel. ‘When I faced the Nightbringer, its mind touched mine. I saw glimpses of what it was, what it had done to the necrons.’

‘I envy you that connection,’ said Ubrique.

‘You should not,’ said Uriel. ‘It was a thing of death incarnate, its existence a horror of slaughter and feasting on souls. Trust me, you would not wish to know the things I saw within that monster’s heart.’

‘The Mechanicus adept in me disagrees,’ said Ubrique, ‘for my knowledge comes from the vastly incomplete references stored in the Sycorax Analyticae. I have patchwork data from hundreds of sources, all unreliable – last reports of vanished expeditions, banned books, the ravings of madmen like Corteswain – yet enough points of congruity appear to allow for the interpolation of certain assumptions that allow a fuller picture of the necrons to emerge. Having reviewed Adept Komeda’s memory engrams, I believe he was correct in his theory that these necrons are somehow damaged, that they are re-enacting a traumatic event from their past.’

‘I think you are correct,’ said Uriel, remembering the terrible things Inquisitor Barzano had told him of the necrons. ‘They are reliving the last days of their civilisation, the moments before their ancient star gods enacted a ritual that destroyed their mortal forms and bound them into the soulless xenospecies we know today.’

‘The hypothesis has merit,’ agreed Ubrique. ‘The power being drained from the sun is what will be used in a doomed attempt to recreate that ritual.’

‘We need to stop this,’ said Uriel, the horror of Sycorax’s people being used as living props in a demented ceremony by the necrons too abhorrent to bear. ‘That spire has to fall.’

‘Indeed it does, but a magma bomb from your cruiser could not do it, and powerful as Lucius Pretorian is, she is not that powerful,’ said Ubrique. ‘Not even a sustained barrage from your cruiser could penetrate the surface deep enough.’

‘Clearly you have a plan for this.’

Ubrique lifted her hand and pointed to the glowing golden orb above her head.

‘We breach the arcology and destroy it at the source.’

Lucius Pretorian was a veteran engine of the Collegia Titanica. It had fought at the Great Slaughter of Beta-Garmon, shed its machine-blood when the Beast arose, and broke the walls of Terra to face the zealous hordes of Goge Vandire. It had weathered the Season of Fire on Armageddon, defended Deimos Binary against the traitors of the Black Legion, and held the line at Mortuary Ridge long enough for Marshal Kagori to rally the Krieg regiments after the overwhelming enemy counter-attack. It had fought the tyrannic hordes of Leviathan within the hollow world of Lucius, waging war by the light of the forge world’s captured star.

Now Lucius Pretorian would walk into the fire of a sun.

Its route to the spire was dogged by swarming necron skimmers and lance-bearing heavy palanquins as it marched between the hills of the city. The light surrounding the tower was blinding, the flash of an atomic blast sustained indefinitely. Nothing recognisably formed by the hands of mortals existed within a radius of two thousand metres of the spire, and beyond that distance, the ground was a protean mire of liquid rock and metal.

The kill-banners on the Reaver’s weapons had long since been retracted into shielded compartments, and the Legio standard had already been withdrawn to spare it immolation.

Lucius Pretorian marched headlong into the thermonuclear blizzards surrounding the spire, bent over like a man in high winds fighting the storm. Trails of ash and smoke billowed from its crashing footfalls as the harrying necron forces abandoned their attacks, unable to pursue the striding Reaver into the hellish conflagration surrounding the spire.

The Titan’s armour began to melt when Ubrique walked it past the two thousand metre line.

Service on Lucius had seen its massive plates of armour reinforced with layered ceramite shielding, heat-exchange mechanisms and all manner of thermal dampening, but even that began to fail as the engine passed the fifteen hundred metres mark. The power of the sun burned the Legio colours from the Titan’s frame, and Komeda and the servitors fought frantically to keep it from overheating. Systems were failing throughout the Reaver as critical infrastructure melted and coolant fluid boiled in the pipes and ductwork.

At the thousand metres mark, Ubrique halted Lucius Pretorian’s march.

Colossal waves of thermal energy washed over the Titan’s frame, conducted through its superstructure through specially installed vanes and panels covering its carapace in lieu of a tertiary weapon system. That energy concentrated within the golden orb suspended above its princeps’ throne. Known by the adepts of Lucius as a Solar Flare, it was a unique relic that combined their expertise in stellar fusion and teleportation technologies. Ordinarily, it acted as a personal teleportation device to be utilised by a single magos in extremis, but with the energy from the heart of a star filling its internal structure, its power was now orders of magnitude greater.

Lucius Pretorian vanished in a flash of blinding light.

12

Uriel barely had time to register what Fabricatus Ubrique was suggesting before his every sense was overloaded with teleportation whiplash. It hit his system like an emergency translation from the immaterium – a cramping of the muscles and a bilious rising of the gorge.

He placed a hand on the nearest bulkhead, riding out the sudden nausea as his physiology immediately compensated.

‘You teleported an entire Titan…’ said Uriel incredulously.

‘I did indeed,’ said Ubrique. ‘It is something of a specialty of Lucius and Legio Astorum.’

‘A little warning next time would be pleasant.’

‘There won’t be a next time,’ said Ubrique as the blast shields over the Reaver’s eyes shuttered back open. ‘No more sun.’

Uriel bent to look through the Titan’s eyes and saw they were about as far from the star’s light as it was possible to imagine. After enduring the searing brightness of the spire for so long, it took his eyes fractionally longer to adjust to the sepulchral darkness beneath Sycorax.

Vast was too small a word for the necron arcology. Uriel had expected rocky cave chambers, caverns hewn from the mantle and hung with stalactites, but this was an underground world, a place wrought in an age before mankind was even a glimmer on the evolutionary horizon. Even the soaring city-caverns below the poisoned surface of Calth paled to insignificance in comparison.

Towering columns of angular black stone supported a series of precisely vaulted galleries that stretched off to infinite depths, impossible to see where any ended or how deep they went. Rippling green lightning writhed the full height of the columns, pulsing life-sustaining energies throughout the echoing immensity of the arcology like a slow-beating heart. Though far from the light of any sun, the arcology was not dark; rather it was filled with a sickly radiance, an undersea illumination like a faint haze in the air.

‘I knew it was going to be immense, but this…’ said Uriel.

‘Fifteen million people, remember?’ said Ubrique.

‘How could something of this scale remain hidden?’

‘I suspect whatever ancient xenotech powers this place kept it from our sight,’ said Ubrique. ‘That, and the fact that we are precisely sixty thousand metres below the planet’s surface, in the boundary region between the lithosphere and upper mantle.’

Uriel leaned back as Ubrique lowered the Titan’s head, and he saw the cavern floor was filled as far as the eye could see with lidless sarcophagi of black stone that swam with the same green light as filled the supporting columns.

The view magnified and sharpened.

‘Guilliman’s Oath,’ hissed Uriel as he saw each of the raised sarcophagi contained two bodies lying next to one another: one human, one necron.

‘Biotransference,’ said Ubrique. ‘You were right.’

‘Are they dead or alive? The people, I mean.’

‘Unknown, but my hope and suspicion would be that the necrons believe that, for this ritual to work, they need their subjects to be kept alive in those capsules.’

‘How do we stop this?’ asked Uriel.

‘Destroying that would probably be a good start,’ said Ubrique.

Five hundred metres before the Titan rose a cyclopean structure of moss-green stone, a tomb wrought in hideous scale, asymmetrical and with proportions conjured from the fevered nightmares of a deranged architect. A dark mirror of Anchorage Citadel, the vast blocks of its ancient construction tessellated into new and ever more complex forms with every passing moment. Onyx steles flickered with esoteric sigils that burned in lines of mercury-bright silver as slender obelisks of crimson-veined marble threw off forking blasts of lightning.

Uriel’s eyes were drawn to the summit of the tomb, where an inverted twin of the spire rising from the planet’s surface pierced the roof of the chamber. Its surfaces writhed with the stolen light of a star, and Uriel sensed how close it was to unleashing that awesome power.

The downward-curved tip of the spire ended just above the tomb complex, and floating beneath it was a gleaming figure of chromium musculature. Robed and hooded in black, it wielded a shadow-bladed scythe, and a translucent globe of light swirled around its deathly form. Furious madness burned in its neon-bright eyes.

The wound on Uriel’s back pulsed with the memory of his first encounter with this being. His mouth tasted of ash just giving voice to its name.

‘Nightbringer.’

The gun decks of Lucius Pretorian echoed with noise and moving machinery as the moderati fought to bring its weapon systems back online. The march through the fire had destroyed many of its critical systems – including over half of its servitors – and the cyber-spyders worked with frantic determination to restore the Titan’s fighting heart.

The Reaver limped along a wide processional between tens of thousands of sarcophagi towards the tomb, its gait stiff and lopsided after losing so many gyroscopic stabilisation systems. Its right leg dragged, drooling lubricants that spilled from its knee and hip joints. The plating around its engine core wept blue-hot streamers of venting plasma as Adept Komeda battled to keep the reactor output balanced between functionality and critical mass.

Whining with building energies, the laser blaster finally swung up with a grinding shriek of bare metal. Stripped of its thermal shielding, the weapon’s capacitors and charge-coils shed whipping whorls of amber light. The auto-loader of the gatling blaster was blocked with shell casings deformed enough by the heat to jam the mechanism, and a team of flash-burned servitors struggled to cut them free before the moderati gave a firing order.

Twenty desperate seconds later, the weapon was ready to unleash hell, and readiness signals were passed to the command bridge. Lucius Pretorian leaned back, its left leg tremoring as it bore the brunt of stabilising the engine.

The order was given and mass lasers and a hail of hard rounds unleashed simultaneously. A storm of las-light and shells blazed from the Reaver’s arms, the power to kill other engines, lay waste to entire armies and demolish even the strongest fortifications.

The summit of the tomb vanished as the wrath of the god-machine’s weapons were loosed in all their sound and fury.

Achieving nothing.

‘Cycling in another volley on target,’ said the moderati in unison.

‘Belay that,’ said Ubrique. ‘Conserve your ammunition – the spire is shielded down here just as it is on the surface.’

‘We need to get into the fight,’ said Uriel. ‘Kill the Nightbringer, the shield falls.’

‘You cannot know that for certain,’ said Ubrique as the viewscreens snapped between the engine’s surviving hull-picters. ‘Besides, going down there would be suicide. The necrons are reacting to our presence en masse.’

Slithering, centipedal and spider-like creatures crawled from mechanised burrows opening at the base of the tomb as lash-tailed forms with hunched carapace shoulders and clawed arms slid through the air above them like ghosts. Gigantic machines, like heavy-limbed stalk-tanks, emerged from sunken vaults, their weapon systems alight with killing fire.

‘Can you fight them?’

‘Ordinarily, yes, with ease,’ said Ubrique. ‘But now, damaged as we are? That will be interesting.’

‘Then get us as close as you can to the tomb,’ said Uriel. ‘We kill the Nightbringer and then you destroy the spire.’

Ubrique nodded, and the command bridge dipped and rose as the motion was translated to the Reaver’s head.

‘Very well, Captain Ventris,’ said Ubrique. ‘Adept Komeda, half-stride. Moderati, prepare for close-in defence.’

‘Yes, princeps,’ said the two moderati, and they began sweeping their hands along noospheric controls invisible to Uriel.

‘Adept Komeda, half-stride if you please.’

‘Apologies, princeps,’ said Komeda. ‘You were correct to advise that the machine-spirit of Lucius Pretorian might prove reluctant to accept commands from an unfamiliar source.’

‘No excuses, adept, I need half-stride now.’

‘Apologies, princeps,’ said Komeda again.

‘Gatling cannon cycled and ready to fire,’ said the left moderatus.

‘Laser blaster fully charged.’

‘Fire when ready. Targets at moderati’s discretion,’ ordered Ubrique. ‘Short blasts only.’

The engine lurched as Komeda finally managed to wrangle the machine-spirit into line.

‘I said half-stride, adept, not battle march,’ warned Ubrique.

Lucius Pretorian stomped forward and Uriel gripped onto a wall handhold as the engine’s frame shook with the violence of its guns opening fire. The full effect was attenuated by the thick armour, but even so, the sound was ferocious.

It was a thing of beauty to watch a highly trained engine crew working together.

‘Ammo feeds cleared, ready to fire again.’

‘Quarter-turn to the right, moderati, enemy at thirty degrees.’

‘Yes, princeps. Engaging now.’

The Titan shook as its gatling cannon swept the cavern floor with high-explosive shells. Mass laser fire lit the underground walls with blazing sheets of red lightning.

‘Reactor shielding failing on third and ninth sectors,’ said Komeda. ‘Expect power lag in laser capacitor load.’

‘Increase coolant flow until you can get it re-shielded.’

‘Two voids down.’

‘Chargers rerouting to compensate.’

Green lights flashed beyond the compartment as the heaviest necron constructs returned fire. Void shields flared in quick succession. Alarms chimed and ceiling-mounted augmitters gave voice to Lucius Pretorian’s binaric fury.

‘Contact! Left foot.’

‘Brace for hard stomp,’ snapped Ubrique. ‘Captain Ventris? Hold onto something.’

Uriel did so, and not a moment too soon as the bridge compartment heeled over to the side as the engine lifted its undamaged leg. Seconds later, it slammed back down, hard, and the whole Titan shook with the thunderous impact.

‘Leg still not clear. I suspect necron scarab constructs.’

‘Adept Komeda. Galvanic burst through the hull on my mark. Three, two, one. Mark.’

A crackling blue haze rippled the view through the screens as the engine’s hull was briefly electrified with a powerful surge from its reactor.

‘Moderati, are we clear?’

‘Confirmed.’

‘Onwards,’ said Ubrique as the guns opened fire again. ‘Now give me full stride, Adept Komeda.’

‘Full stride, aye, princeps.’

‘Moderati, cut us a path.’

No sooner were the words out of Ubrique’s mouth than something swam through the command bridge’s hull. Uriel saw it as a grainy outline of silver steel, long hook-bladed claws and a segmented, lashing tail. The creature’s outline phased in and out of perception like a phantom pict-wraith. Malevolent green eye-orbs flashed in its reptilian skull.

‘Enemy within!’ yelled Uriel.

The creature flew towards Ubrique, its bronzed skin rippling with reflected light as its outline solidified. Uriel vaulted the command throne and kicked his booted feet at its skull. But instead of a crushing impact, he sailed right through the creature’s insubstantial form. He landed behind the two moderati, rolling to his feet and raising his arm before remembering the boltstorm barrel had been cut from his gauntlet.

Uriel cursed, but the command bridge of a Battle Titan was no place for gunplay anyway. No room to swing his sword either, but his gauntlet was a weapon in and of itself.

The wraith-creature spun towards him, its claws lashing like bladed whips. Uriel grunted in pain as they passed clean through his war plate, slicing deep into the flesh of his chest. Before it could withdraw its claws, Uriel swung his fist at the monster’s skull.

This time his blow connected. Its head buckled and its form cohered further into solidity.

Uriel didn’t give it time to recover and gripped its neck. It thrashed like a hooked snake, all fangs and claws. Its tail sliced into his greaves, again drawing blood. Uriel felt his grip on its neck slipping, but before it could decohere, he twisted his wrist and snapped its neck. It fell limp as cut rope, and veins of green light flared as its body collapsed in dissolution.

Uriel let out a breath just as a second spectral wraith passed through the solid metal of the Titan’s head with a braying shriek.

‘No!’ he cried as its tail speared straight into Princeps Ubrique’s chest.

Lucius Pretorian convulsed in repercussive pain. The engine and its princeps were bound together in body and mind. What one felt, so too did the other. Both moderati screamed, spasming in their seats as they experienced their mistress’ sensations.

But before Uriel could come to her aid, a pair of telescoping mechadendrites punched up into the wraith’s body and ripped it in half. Ubrique’s mechadendrites fell limp to the floor, their data-spikes crackling with lethal power. She sighed and let out a long, shuddering breath.

‘Princeps?’ said Uriel, moving to kneel by her throne. ‘What can I do?’

Her skin was waxy and layered with a sheen of sweet-smelling sweat. One mortal eye was bloodshot and wide with pain, the other fizzing with warning sigils. The wound in her chest was wide and deep, and the purple-red of Mechanicus blood soaked her robes, flowing in a steady stream to pool in her lap.

‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t stop it in time.’

Ubrique shook her head. ‘Not your fault… but I fear this is as far as we can take you.’

Uriel bridged his vox directly to Apothecary Selenus.

‘Selenus,’ said Uriel. ‘Get to the command bridge now!’

‘On my way. Are you injured?’

‘No, but Princeps Ubrique is wounded. Penetrating blade wound to the chest.’

‘Understood,’ Selenus replied and cut the link.

Uriel looked out through the viewports. The tomb lay two hundred metres away.

‘Go,’ said Ubrique. ‘Kill that thing and give us our shot.’

Uriel nodded and said, ‘Stay alive until our return.’

‘I will try,’ said Ubrique. ‘But I cannot promise to obey your command.’

‘Not good enough. You will live,’ said Uriel as Apothecary Selenus entered the command bridge and knelt beside Ubrique’s throne.

‘Don’t let her die,’ said Uriel.

Selenus sighed. ‘In recent times, I have grown quite accustomed to treating the wounds of mortals. On my oath, I will make sure she survives.’

‘Good hunting, Captain Ventris,’ said Ubrique. ‘We will cover your advance as best we can, but when that thing is dead, get clear.’

‘Don’t wait for us. When it dies, you shoot,’ said Uriel.

‘If I cannot, the moderati will,’ promised Ubrique.

Uriel nodded and made his way back down the Titan’s structure, moving swiftly through the smoke-filled companionways and workspaces.

‘Swords of Calth, we are disembarking,’ he voxed. ‘Rally at the embarkation point.’

The engine’s cramped interior reeked of scorched meat and burned iron. Oily water dripped from every surface, and pools of hissing coolant leaked from ruptured pipes and vents. Uriel stepped over the char-black bodies of dead servitors as drained fire control systems sputtered overhead. By the time he reached the place they’d boarded the Titan, his warriors were gathered in the tightly cramped spaces by the hatch below the reactor and ready to fight.

Pasanius nodded to him, and Uriel smiled as he saw Learchus. The sergeant of Guardian Squad reached out and gripped his forearm.

‘Captain Ventris,’ said Learchus with typical formality.

‘It has been too long, Learchus,’ said Uriel, clapping a hand to his shoulder guard.

‘We are just glad to have you back again, captain,’ said Learchus, holding a magnificent bolt rifle out to Uriel. ‘And this is for you.’

Uriel took the weapon as though it were a holy relic. Its construction was a mix of old and new, artificer-crafted with bronze cheek plates polished to a mirror sheen and a body patched from working parts of steel and ancient iron. Its box magazine was carved with lightning and eagles, wrought by a master craftsman.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘It is an incredible piece of work.’

‘I commissioned it from Harkus in anticipation of your return,’ said Learchus. ‘He groused constantly during its forging, but even he seemed to relish the symmetry of it.’

‘Symmetry?’ said Uriel.

‘Look on the other side.’

Uriel turned the bolt rifle over and there, carved above the ejection port, was a pair of handworked letters in a style he knew well. An L and a V.

‘Lucian Ventris…’ said Uriel in disbelief.

His illustrious ancestor, who, along with every other warrior of the Ultramarines First Company, had fought and died in battle against the tyrannic hordes of Hive Fleet Behemoth during the Battle of Macragge. This was history come to life, his history, and Uriel was overwhelmed by the gesture.

‘Harkus named it Invictus,’ said Learchus.

Uriel nodded and racked the slide.

‘I will do it honour,’ he promised. ‘And its first task will be to slay a god.’

The Swords of Calth debarked from the wounded Titan, its giant feet wreathed in smoke and the ceramite plating of its legs still hot to the touch. As Uriel’s booted feet touched the ground, he had a sudden sensation of weightlessness, reminding him that this place was anchored deep in the planet’s layers of molten metal and rock.

What might happen to such a place when its creator dies?

He let the question go unanswered as he and his warriors prepared for battle. A host of necron tomb guardians were converging on the injured Reaver at speed, a scuttling, crawling, flying mass of bronzed metal and soulless green eyes.

Learchus had brought a full loadout for each warrior, and they swiftly reloaded with enough full magazines to wage a small war. With his bolter rearmed and his pouches filled with fresh shells, Brutus Cyprian reverently handed Pasanius the meltagun that had once belonged to Livius Hadrianus.

‘Livius would want you to have this,’ said Cyprian. ‘You always did like the hot weapons, and I’m a bolter and blade fighter anyway.’

‘Thank you,’ said Pasanius. ‘I will honour his memory with every foe I kill.’

‘He’d like that,’ said Cyprian, his voice choked with grief.

Uriel shared Cyprian’s aching sadness. The death of Hadrianus had been a grievous blow to the Swords of Calth, and his gene-seed going unharvested was an incalculable loss to the Chapter – a legacy of heroism that could not now be passed to future generations of Ultramarines.

‘Here they come,’ said Uriel, turning and drawing his sword. ‘We face them head-on. Do not stop, no matter what. We fight our way through, and then we climb. Understood?’

His warriors nodded in affirmation: Pasanius, Learchus, Cyprian and Nero.

The noise of the tomb guardians swelled, the necrons coming on in a discordant mass of scraping mandibles and rasping steel talons. They numbered in the hundreds, but there were not so many as to strike fear into the hearts of these warriors of Ultramar.

Uriel looked up at the sound of metal grinding against metal as the upper body of Lucius Pretorian bent over. Its right arm was locked out and depressed as far down as it could go. He felt the static build-up of its firing sequence.

A searing cascade of point-blank mass-las ripped through the constructs in a surge tide of blazing fire. The onslaught obliterated them by the hundreds, a rolling blitz of engine fire incinerating the creatures and burning a path to the tomb as the weapon slowly elevated.

‘Thank you, Princeps Ubrique,’ said Uriel. ‘Swords of Calth, battle pace!’

13

The colossal tomb dwarfed the Astartes warriors racing up its alien immensity.

Its steps were scaled for beings very different to humans, every proportion wrong and every form innately pleasing to the eye reversed or perverted in its opposition. Mortal minds might fray at the sight of such unnatural geometries, but the psyches of the Adeptus Astartes were armoured against such metaphysical horrors.

Or is it simply that we have not the imagination to truly comprehend such things?

Behind them, Lucius Pretorian swept the base of the tomb with screaming blasts of las and explosive shells. None of the constructs would be following the Space Marines. Swarms of scarabs and the clawing spider-constructs gnawed at the engine’s feet, and the grotesque centipede creatures coiled around its legs in search of an entry point.

The Titan would fight to the end, no matter what.

‘They build these tombs big,’ said Pasanius, arms pumping as he climbed.

‘It didn’t look this big from Lucius Pretorian,’ admitted Uriel.

‘Everything looks small from a Titan,’ said Learchus. ‘I have read that such distortions of scale are often their downfall.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Petronius Nero.

‘The writings of Grand Master Ferromort speak of it. He wrote, “Despise infantry if you must. Crush them underfoot, by all means. But do not ignore them. Battlefields are littered with the wreckage of Titans whose crews ignored infantry.”’

‘Since when are you a student of engine war?’ asked Pasanius.

‘I am a student of all forms of war,’ replied Learchus.

‘And what do your studies tell you of this particular moment?’ said Nero, rolling his shoulders and flexing his sword grip.

‘Five warriors against an alien god?’ said Learchus. ‘Poor odds by any reckoning.’

‘Scared?’ asked Pasanius with mock seriousness.

‘It is a fearful thing we attempt, but scared? No. It is a thing that must be done, so we will do it.’

Learchus’ unaffected heroism was infectious, his determination an inspiration.

‘You are the Swords of Calth, the best of the best,’ said Uriel. ‘We are trapped far beneath the surface of the planet, with no way back. We will soon face an ancient and implacable foe, yet not one of you has any hesitation in taking the next step onwards.

‘Because that is what Ultramarines do. We take the next step onwards when no one else can. Not because we are better than other soldiers, but because that is what is required of us. This is the duty and responsibility each and every one of us accepts.’

Uriel turned to Pasanius when he spoke next. ‘You were right, Pasanius. Every soldier of the Imperium is a hero, whether Astartes or mortal, each man and woman a link in the great chain holding the Emperor’s enemies at bay. And today it is our turn to step onward.’

His warriors knew this, had always known it, but it stirred the heart of every one of them to hear their leader give voice to it. Like all soldiers of courage and honour, the Astartes fought not for recognition nor plaudits, but for the sake of doing what was honourable, for the confraternity and respect of their fellows.

And as any good leader knew, respect given was returned tenfold.

‘We’re here,’ said Nero, as the summit of the tomb finally came into view. Amber radiance ran through the angled surfaces of the structure, pouring down its angular surfaces and along channels cut into the stonework like lines of molten gold. It flowed out towards the millions of sarcophagi spread throughout the infinite chambers.

‘The biotransference,’ said Learchus. ‘It’s beginning.’

Uriel turned and took the next step onward.

‘Then let us end it now,’ he said.

The summit of the tomb was an endlessly shifting pattern of geometric blocks moving in and out like pieces of a three-dimensional puzzle box. Shapes rose and fell, rotated and slid over the black stone as if constantly seeking the right place in which to settle. The lower tip of the spire linked with the tomb in a coruscating arc of emerald light, too bright to look upon directly. Stolen energies poured into the arcanic structure of the tomb, transferring unimaginably vast quantities of power through its bio-conductive architecture.

Surrounded by a translucent veil of darkness, the immense form of the Nightbringer drifted with its head thrown back in a silent scream. The depths of its silver skin swam with the light of all the stars it had murdered, and its soul-stealing weapon was so dark as to resemble a wound cut directly into some far-distant, lightless universe.

Many years had passed since Uriel had last set eyes on the Nightbringer, but all the wars and bloodshed since that moment poured into his mind, drawn forth in a torrent of remembered slaughter simply by the presence of the malevolent star god. Beside him, Pasanius shook his head, as if to clear water from his ear.

‘Damn,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ said Brutus Cyprian.

‘That thing,’ said Pasanius. ‘It fills your head with thoughts of blood and death. With hatred and fury.’

Cyprian nodded, fighting to keep grief at Hadrianus’ death from turning to hate. The others took pause, steeling their minds for the fight to come.

‘Spread out,’ said Uriel. ‘Nothing elaborate. We surround it and kill it.’

Pasanius and Learchus arced left, Nero and Cyprian right. As if finally deigning to notice their presence, the creature turned towards them, and Uriel saw something in its eyes, something he couldn’t quite identify.

‘It sees us,’ said Uriel.

‘We teleported here in a Battle Titan,’ pointed out Nero. ‘We were hard to miss.’

‘No, that is not what I meant,’ said Uriel. ‘Its kind never sees us, not really. We are merely sustenance or servants. We are less than nothing to them, but this thing, this pale god, today it sees us. And the idea we might actually be capable of being more than slaves intrigues it…’

The Nightbringer drifted through the air, and a pall of blood red gathered around it. Dead light built within, throwing its grotesquely drawn features into stark relief. Like every necron thing they had seen on Sycorax, its face was painted white, but this was the source of the ghastly woad. Uriel saw something vaguely human in its face, but knew that for a lie. This was a creature from an age undreamed of by mortal minds, one whose form became a hideous mockery of those around it. An avatar of the grave, a harbinger of nightmares, a species-deep imprint of death.

And in that guise, the Nightbringer flew at them.

Its scythe swept out, and Petronius Nero was the first to fall, a black wound carved through the eagle of his plastron. He dropped to one knee, fighting to remain upright.

Learchus and Cyprian unleashed hails of bolter shells at the same time as Pasanius fired the melta with a shrieking blast. Mass-reactives punched deep into its gleaming body, swallowed by the liquid form of its living metal without exploding. The roiling haze of superheated air burned away its cowl of shadows. Almost as soon as it flew off in ashes, it reformed upon the Nightbringer’s sculpted shoulders, winding around its arms like embalmers’ cloth.

Uriel aimed for the centre of its head and squeezed the trigger of Invictus. A perfectly aimed shell struck the Nightbringer in the face, but again its alien flesh swallowed the shell without effect.

Its voracious eyes fastened upon Uriel, and the unlooked-for bond forged in the shared moment of connection below Pavonis surged once more in his mind. He felt a spike of hate, a memory of a sunken place, and a threat it could not ignore.

‘You remember me,’ he snarled. ‘Or at least some part of you does.’ He sensed the rightness of that, but the thing’s knowledge of him was skewed by madness. Incomplete, fragmentary…

As though the memory of him belonged to something else…

It twisted in the air and came at him with mouth stretched wide in an endless scream. The scythe flashed for his neck in an executioner’s blow.

Flaring sparks of negative energy exploded from the impact on Uriel’s sword as it blocked the blade. The strength behind the scythe was immense, and Uriel felt his arm go numb at the impact. Its vast weapon suddenly reversed, and the blade punched down into Uriel’s stomach.

Terrible cold filled him, the chill of the grave freighted with the stench of the charnel house and worms feasting on his flesh. He cried out, as though the crawling carrion creatures of the earth were already gnawing his bones.

In response, the sinew coils within his body clamped painfully down on his skeletal structure, hardening it and thrumming with power as they tensed in readiness to strike. The pain of his Primaris physique taking over snapped him from the illusory phantoms conjured in his mind by the Nightbringer’s power. Renewed strength filled Uriel, snapping through his limbs as regenerative stimms sealed the wound and pumped fire into his flesh.

He roared and ducked below the creature’s follow-on strike, sweeping his sword out in a series of vengeful cuts. No finesse, no grace, just the killing strikes of a butcher. His sword bit deep into the shimmering blue-white metal of its body again and again, hammering impacts and churning twists of the blade designed to wreak maximum havoc within a body.

A mortal foe would be dead thrice over, hacked to bloody pieces. The Nightbringer was a creature of death itself and its wounds sealed like a breached hull beneath a Techmarine’s arc-welder.

But not all of them. Weeping veils of light floated from its unnatural flesh.

More mass-reactives punched into its body, and it turned from Uriel to spin around with a scream of rage to whip its scythe out once again. This time Brutus Cyprian fell, his armour split from collarbone to pelvis. He dropped to his knees, blood sheeting from the wound, but so great was his fury that he simply refused to die.

His voice thick with up-rushing blood, he shouted, ‘For Livius Hadrianus!’ and emptied his magazine into the Nightbringer before toppling onto his side.

The creature’s flesh swallowed each bolt, but this time its body convulsed with internal explosions. Its metal form bulged and swelled, bleeding streamers of oily black liquid that drizzled out as though in zero gravity.

‘It’s hurt,’ said Learchus, rolling in to fire into its flank. ‘Finish it!’

‘Learchus!’ cried Pasanius as the Nightbringer turned its gaze upon the sergeant and its eyes flared with killing light. Learchus cried out, his body spasming as his armour turned from its rich cobalt blue to a corroded umber, ageing a thousand years in the blink of an eye. Locked in place, his bolter fell apart in shards of rusted scrap.

Pasanius rushed to Learchus’ side as the Nightbringer rounded on Uriel.

‘I beat you once before,’ he said with utter conviction. ‘And I will do it again.’

The Nightbringer drifted over, slowly, deliberately, confident in its triumph. Its pulsing, deathly eyes locked with Uriel’s.

He had stared into the howling abyss of the reborn star god’s unspeakable, predatory mind on Pavonis, and it in turn had seen into the farthest reaches of his. That long-ago connection had given Uriel a glimpse of the incomprehensible scale of the Nightbringer’s vast intellect, the inhuman logic of its terrible hunger and the utter lack of significance the young races held for it.

But this… this mind held something new. Something fearful…

That fear was a rich seam in its shattered psyche, an aeons-deep terror of extinction and servitude. Its combined self had once fed across the span of a thousand stars, but this thing was a pale shadow of the creature he had faced on Pavonis.

And that was when Uriel knew…

‘You are not the Nightbringer,’ he said. ‘You are just a lost shard of it, an insignificant fragment, forgotten and insane.’

The black scythe blade slid through the air, halting a handspan from Uriel’s neck.

‘Broken from your whole, you hid rather than fight, and your mind retreated into madness, to a time before… A time when you truly were something akin to a god,’ said Uriel, knowing in his gut that he had read the contours of its mind correctly. ‘Your former devotees, the mortal race of necrons? They have long since ceased to exist, and this ritual you are attempting – it was done entire ages of the galaxy before my species even existed. All of this is meaningless.’

The connection between Uriel and the shard of the thing calling itself the Nightbringer pulsed with the awful truth of that knowledge. It tried to pull away, to deny it, to spare its broken mind the searing light of truth. The truth that it was not what it thought itself to be, that its entire existence was a lie.

Uriel held its consciousness fast to his, pouring every certainty of what he knew into the creature and exposing it to the unfiltered truth of its despair.

The pit of its insanity was as dark as the stars it had once fed upon were bright. Hiding from the rest of its kind, trapped beneath Sycorax and denying the truth of its nature as a mere fragment of something far more terrible, it had sunk into obsession, devoted to a half-remembered task that no longer mattered and never had. Never could it shed that lunacy, nor could it ever return to its former existence.

Its voice echoed in Uriel’s mind.

Do eagles still circle the mountain?

‘Yes,’ said Uriel. ‘They do once more.’

The lost shard of the Nightbringer threw back its head and screamed, a cry of despair and pain. Its silver form blackened, the reflective metal dulling as it sank to the ground. It knelt as if in prayer, as the will binding it to existence lifted away like the stirred ashes of a dead fire.

Uriel picked himself up and placed Invictus against the creature’s skull. He felt its fear – that same fear its original form had imprinted upon the galaxy’s dreams.

Its head turned, but Uriel had no wish to give it any last valediction.

‘You think you know fear?’ said Uriel. ‘Then fear me.’

He pulled the trigger, and the Nightbringer’s body exploded in ash and dust.

Uriel and Pasanius gathered the Swords of Calth and made their limping, staggering way from the tomb. The spire’s light was still pouring into the chamber, but without the will of the creature that had called it into being to direct it, all it was doing was destroying a star for no purpose. The Ultramarines had prevailed, but the cost had been high.

Learchus bore the weight of Petronius Nero, whose heart and lungs had been cloven beyond his body’s ability to repair. Selenus, if he still lived, could sustain him, but he needed a full apothecarion to survive. Brutus Cyprian’s body had been split almost in two, and only the enclosing form of his armour and copious volumes of pain balms were keeping him upright and in once piece. Like Nero, his life hung in the balance.

Learchus was moving stiffly, the plates of his armour seized-up and all but immobile. His armour cracked and shed spalling flakes of rust with every step.

As soon as Uriel was certain the shard of the Nightbringer was gone, he had voxed over to Lucius Pretorian and given the order to fire. Without its shield, the spire was defenceless. He had received no answer and feared the worst for the engine and its crew. As they descended from the tomb’s summit, Uriel saw the towering form of the Titan down on one knee in the midst of a giant ring of scrap metal and molten constructs. The wounded right leg was buckled and collapsed, and only the engine’s gatling cannon, hanging limply at its side by straining sinew cables and chains, kept the Titan from falling.

‘Lucius Pretorian still endures,’ he said.

‘Looks like it gave a good fight,’ said Pasanius.

‘Princeps Ubrique,’ said Uriel. ‘Can you hear me? Are your weapon systems functional?’

Eventually, a faint, skirling signal drifted through Uriel’s ear-bead. Hesitant words were coming through on an Astartes channel, and though the ident code was that of Selenus, the voice was not that of the Apothecary.

‘Komeda?’ said Uriel.

‘Captain Ventris!’ said the adept. ‘You prevailed!’

‘Why are you on an Astartes network?’

‘Ah, yes, well, we have had quite the battle here,’ said the adept. ‘A surging transmission blew out our vox-system, and we had no way to reach you until Apothecary Selenus suggested this workaround using his helmet.’

‘Does Princeps Ubrique still live?’ asked Uriel.

‘She does,’ said Komeda. ‘Though she has shifted the bulk of her primary functionality offline to aid in her recovery efforts. But in answer to your previous question, the gatling cannon is non-functional, but the laser blaster is still operational. Lucius Pretorian and Adept Komeda have come to something of an understanding, and there is more than enough power left in the reactor to utterly obliterate the spire a hundred times over.’

Uriel nodded. ‘And what of the necrons and the civilians entombed together?’

‘Regretfully, a small percentage of the civilians now appear to be dead, but the vast majority remain alive, sustained for now in the same sarcophagi originally intended for their dreadful rebirth. As to the necrons, Adept Komeda cannot say for certain what befell them, but just before you made contact, their every system appeared to shut down in response to a singular transmission. It was most curious.’

‘What transmission?’ said Uriel.

‘Well, the signal that blew out our vox was a phrase previously known to us. You remember, from Variava Station? It said, “Do eagles still circle the mountain?” Do you understand what it means?’

‘I do now,’ said Uriel, looking back to the summit where the light of the spire still burned.

‘Perhaps you might enlighten Adept Komeda?’

‘Perhaps later,’ said Uriel. ‘But for now, just take the shot. Destroy the spire.’

As the closest to mortal among them, the moderati were the first to die.

Thirty-five days after the death of the necron shard-god, their bodies finally succumbed to lack of food and water. Reclaimed and imperfectly filtered fluids from the machinery of the Titan, together with recycled moisture from the Space Marines’ armour, had kept them alive longer than ought to have been possible, but it could only last so long.

The adepts of the Mechanicus, much less dependent on such biological needs, lasted another sixteen days before their flesh began to fail. To conserve energy and reduce their oxygen intake, Adept Komeda and Princeps Ubrique chose to link with the slowing heartbeat of Lucius Pretorian and enter a state of machine dormancy. It would be many decades, centuries even, before the mighty engine’s plasma heart finally cooled, and perhaps they too might last as long, but in the last moments before Ubrique closed her eyes, she told Uriel that this was as close to becoming one with the Machine-God as any servant of the Omnissiah could hope for.

Space Marines, sustained by the hyper-efficient recycling mechanisms of their armour and with physiques genhanced far beyond baseline humans, had long been considered functionally immortal, and the Swords of Calth were about to put that to the test.

Apothecary Selenus placed both Brutus Cyprian and Petronius Nero into the induced coma of the sus-an membrane, slowing their systems to a point just above death and allowing their bodies to heal. In such a state a Space Marine could survive years before being revived.

Pasanius and Uriel’s wounds were many and deep, but Selenus declared none so severe as to require the activation of the hibernator implant.

But it was Learchus upon whom the greatest changes had been wrought. The gaze of the Nightbringer had destroyed his armour, hastening its decrepitude by thousands of years in an instant. It had saved his life, but he had not escaped the monster’s touch entirely. Though only a year younger than Uriel, Learchus now had the face of a warrior centuries older, his patrician features deeply lined and his hair as white as the snow covering the tallest peaks of the Laponis Mountains.

The machinery of the necron arcology remained entirely active throughout this time, the vast quantities of energy stored in the tomb structure sustaining the captured civilian populace of Sycorax within the suspended animation of the reanimation sarcophagi. The necron warriors entombed with them lay as inert as statues, bereft of whatever force once gave them their semblance of life. The metal of their bodies began corroding at an accelerated rate, and on the hundredth day after the death of their master, nothing remained save a gritty metallic dust.

The days, of course, were measured only by the internal chrons of their power armour, for there was neither day nor night in this sunken sepulchre, only an endless, unchanging twilight, a moment preserved in amber forever. Uriel, Pasanius, Learchus and Selenus spent their time exploring the farthest edges of their domain or in training: maintaining their bodies and armour as best they could, holding to old and familiar routines to maintain discipline and sanity.

Nothing changed or ever would in the depths of the world. There was no escape and no way to stave off the inevitable.

But on the one hundred and seventeenth day after teleporting into the sepulchre, something changed in their changeless prison.

Selenus felt it first, a growing tremor in the rock, a faint vibration in the air. He gathered his fellow warriors to where the more sensitive augur mechanisms of his narthecium had detected the changes.

‘Here,’ he said, his hand flat upon the smooth stone. ‘It is strongest here.’

Uriel followed his Apothecary’s example, placing his palm on the wall. ‘I feel it,’ he said. ‘Faint, but it is there. What is it?’

Selenus shook his head. ‘I am an Apothecary, not a magos geologica, I don’t know what it might be. A shifting of the mantle, seismic activity? Or perhaps the mechanisms sustaining this place are beginning to fail.’

‘Always with an uplifting thought, eh, Selenus?’ said Pasanius, placing his ear to the wall.

‘What is there to be uplifting about in this place?’ snapped the Apothecary.

‘Whatever this is, its intensity is growing,’ said Learchus, stepping away.

Within seconds, the tremors, which had hitherto only been detectable via Selenus’ specialised kit, were impossible to miss. The rock was palpably vibrating, and Uriel heard a distant rumbling sound of grinding rock.

And beyond it, a high-pitched pulse of something too regular to be anything but artificial.

‘Get back,’ ordered Uriel.

They moved away from the wall as the sound grew louder, the vibrations sending cracks snaking across the glassy black floor. Chunks of stone fell from the wall and the noise grew to a deafening crescendo before a point of light became visible at its centre.

‘What is that?’ said Learchus, but Uriel already knew.

The wall before them churned like liquid, the rock dissolving in the searing heat of melta cutters and crushed by the interlocking drill-blades on the prow of a Hades breaching drill as it finally ripped its way into the sepulchre.

The hull of the colossal mining vehicle was burned black by its long journey from the surface, and as it ground to a halt thirty metres into the cavern, Uriel saw an array of heat-shielded cables, rumbling debris conveyors and smoking rock in its wake. Its enormously toothed disc-blades slowly began to halt their spinning motion, throwing chunks of half-dissolved rock and rubble to the ground. Its flanks were scored and dented, smoking with the heat of its journey into the depths, but in a recessed reliquary, Uriel saw a scorched symbol he recognised. A pair of crossed felling axes upon an eagle with a crosswise lasrifle emblazoned at its centre. He knew it from the shoulder patches of the three Militarum soldiers in whose company they had fought their way across Port Setebos.

The symbol of the 161st Caen Pioneer and Construction Battalion.

Uriel went around to the rear of the Hades as the locking wheel of its crew hatch cranked and the door swung open with a heavy clang. Cold air billowed, and a tall, dark-skinned woman stepped out, wearing only thin work-overalls and blue-polarised goggles. Her uniform and hair were soaked in sweat despite the conditioned air within the drill vehicle.

She lifted her goggles up and smiled in undisguised relief to see the Space Marines.

‘I knew you would still be alive,’ said Elia Vivaro.

Epilogue

Hooded servitors stood at the cardinal points of the arming chamber, wreathed in sweet-smelling smoke from the braziers they carried in iron gauntlets. The coals had been hewn from the rock of Macragge, and the smell took Uriel back to the back-breaking weeks he’d spent hauling boulders in the high mine-canyons as an Agiselus trainee.

He knelt at the centre of the vaulted room with his arms outstretched and his head down, the smell of lapping powder, pure lubricants and smoking incense filling his senses. He kept his eyes closed, and memories from his time as an Ultramarine filled his mind – a litany of wars won, battle-brothers lost and an honourable legacy stretching far back beyond the span of his own service. A humbling sense of something far bigger than any one life swept through him, purpose and duty alloyed with courage and honour to form an unbreakable chain from past to present.

A whisper of binaric cant filled the air with a soft susurration, entreaties to the armour’s spirit of protection and devotion. The war plate was currently inactive, sitting heavy on Uriel’s body, and for the moment he was a prisoner within, as immobile as he had been in the cult of the skin-wearing necrons. Bustling Chapter-serfs surrounded Uriel, three of them hefting the last of his heavy pauldrons into place and fixing it to the auto-reactive mounts with whining pneumo-drills. The weight was heavy across his back, and Uriel flinched as invasive neural-links wormed their way into his flesh through the connection ports drilled through his shoulders.

A heavy footfall stepped towards him, and Uriel felt the presence of a vast and powerful being, one that could crush him without effort. It stepped around him, wearing its awesome power like a cloak. It reached down to his back and Uriel heard a whine of servo-motors, swiftly followed by a surge of power as fibre-bundle muscles flexed, constricting and releasing in sequence across his body.

‘Open your eyes and stand up.’

Uriel obeyed the instructions, rising to his feet in one smooth motion.

Techmarine Harkus stood over him, his immense Dreadnought frame utterly dwarfing Uriel. The plates of his sarcophagus were of a darker hue than the fresh cobalt blue of Uriel’s armour. Stubborn flakes of ash were worked into the folds of the great eagle wings across his sepulchre that no amount of scrubbing by his forge-serfs could ever hope to remove.

A pair of ebon-black servo-skulls clicked and whirred to one another as they darted in zipping, figure-of-eight patterns around Uriel. A third with a ratcheting quill mechanism hovered in an upper corner of the room, and the skritch, skritch, skritch of its ink-stylus over a steadily unrolling length of parchment was like the drone of a buzzing insect trapped in a glass specimen jar.

‘You can drop your arms now,’ said Harkus. ‘Move your joints. Test the seals. Feel the fit.’

Uriel nodded and rolled his shoulders, flexed his limbs, and assumed the standard fighting forms one after another. He felt lithe and unencumbered, the smooth range of motion this new armour allowed so very different from the heavy Gravis plate.

Harkus had stripped the battered Gravis armour from Uriel’s back upon his return to the surface, declaring the infestation of parasitic necron nano-creatures too severe to undo. The freshly renewed Fabricatus Ubrique had performed the Rites of Deconsecration, releasing the armour’s machine-spirit from its duty and allowing it to return to the thermodynamic whole. At the ritual’s end, the armour’s substance was sent to its final rest in the fires of one of the few remaining foundries within Port Setebos.

The Dreadnought Techmarine reached out, the crushing digits of his oversized fist dexterous beyond belief, and tugged the edges of Uriel’s pauldrons, greaves and plastron. Eventually, he stepped back, apparently satisfied with the work of the serfs.

‘Say what you will about Cawl, he knows his armour,’ observed Harkus, which was as close as the Techmarine ever came to complimenting the work of those beyond his forge. He waved his massive fist, and the Chapter-serfs came forward once again, two of them fastening the clasps of Uriel’s pteruges to the golden ultima at his belt as a third hung the bottle-green cloak at his shoulders. Another looped his sword belt around him, and the weight of Idaeus’ blade and a combat knife was a welcome pressure at Uriel’s waist.

Finally, a pair of hunched gun-bearers stepped in front of him, shaven heads bowed and bearing a heavy wooden gun case between them. Harkus opened the case, and Uriel stared in renewed wonder at the black-and-bronze form of Invictus. The bolter’s mechanisms had been cleaned and oiled, its cheek-plates burnished to a mirror finish.

Uriel lifted the weapon, checked the action and chamber, then mag-locked it to his thigh. The action felt natural, the fit of his weapons perfectly matching his reach.

‘How does it feel?’ asked Harkus.

‘Like I am clad only in a simple training chiton in the gymnasia,’ said Uriel.

Harkus grunted in agreement. ‘Gravis is all well and good, but it suits a certain battlefield role and command temperament,’ he said. ‘Mark X Tacticus is much more suited to your impromptu style of leadership.’

Uriel took no offence at Harkus’ observation. It would be hard to argue, and Harkus was a warrior who brooked no disagreement in his assessments of character.

‘Come,’ said Harkus, stepping aside. ‘The Swords are waiting.’

Uriel and Harkus climbed the angular ramps within the square-cut drum towers of Anchorage Citadel to the upper landing platforms. As they looked out over Port Setebos, the crisp clean air was free of the actinic tang that had so long been the hallmark of the necron attack.

The civilian populace imprisoned beneath Mount Shokereth were still being brought up to the surface, frightened and dazed from their experience, but alive and thankful for their rescue. A final tally of the civilian dead was yet to be reached, but the Analyticae’s current projections put the death toll at close to seven hundred thousand souls. Of the necrons entombed with them, nothing now remained save dust and ash, and secretive representatives of the ordos were already rumoured to be en route to investigate this latest awakening.

Mechanicus geoformers were still cutting a path through the planet’s crust large enough for Lucius Pretorian to return to the surface just as soon as the army of enginseers, tech-adepts and servitors had repaired the god-engine’s legs and brought its mighty heart back online. Lucius Pretorian would march again.

Uriel paused before climbing the last ramp to the tower’s uppermost landing platform, sweeping his gaze across the isthmus of Port Setebos. To the north and south, dark swells of the ocean stretched into the horizon, while to the east and west, three-quarters of the city lay in ruins. Many months had passed since the death of the Nightbringer shard, but still fully half the necron spire’s height remained above the surface. Specialised Mechanicus assets were working diligently to carefully demolish the xenostructure in conjunction with the Caen forces, and Fabricatus Ubrique had assured Alexia and Casimir Nassaur it would be excised from the planetary substrate by year’s end.

Munitorum work gangs, together with the growing body of the returned populace, were toiling night and day to restore the industrial might and infrastructure of their home. The city’s foundries were already receiving raw materials from afar for smelting, and the few operational fabricatus yards were thrumming with new power and potential.

‘Captain Ventris?’ said Harkus, when he saw Uriel was not following him. ‘Is there some malfunction with your armour?’

‘No,’ said Uriel.

‘Then why do we not proceed?’

‘The cold winds and clean air,’ said Uriel.

‘What about them?’

‘On Sycorax, such things are unusual enough that I feel the need to savour them.’

‘Current projections of increasing industrial output suggest emissions of hydrocarbons and atmospheric pollutants will reach previous levels within ninety days.’

‘All the more reason to take pause,’ said Uriel, though he saw Harkus did not share his sentiment.

‘The Imperial machine keeps turning,’ said Harkus. ‘Even a xenos invasion does not halt it for long.’

‘The Imperium endures,’ agreed Uriel, turning away.

They climbed onto the platform, where an honour guard of Astra Militarum, skitarii and Sycorax planetary militia were ranked up in deep lines before the armoured bulk of an idling Thunderhawk gunship in the livery of the Ultramarines. The Space Marines of Firebrand and Guardian squads stood at the gunship’s prow.

Uriel marched between the Imperial soldiers to where the Nassaur twins and a colour party bearing a host of fluttering banners awaited them. Though none of them were his Chapter colours, fierce pride swelled in Uriel’s breast as he saw the various flags. Militia troopers held the banners of Sycorax and House Nassaur, while the standards of Forge World Lucius and Legio Astorum were borne by Fabricatus Ubrique and Adept Komeda, each of whom gave solemn bows of acknowledgement.

Finally, Uriel saw the battle flag of the Caen Pioneers. He smiled to see that banner borne by Kyra Vance and Vigo Tengger. Elia Vivaro stood next to them, resplendent in a pressed uniform and the copper breastplate of a Militarum officer. All three bore the scars and wounds of their time with the Ultramarines and should in all likelihood still be confined to a medicae ward, but they had more than earned this honour.

With Harkus at his back, Uriel halted before Alexia and Casimir Nassaur. Both twins stepped forward and bowed deeply, offering him the sign of the aquila.

‘The Ultramarines deployment to Sycorax is at an end,’ said Uriel.

‘Our world again owes you a great debt,’ said Alexia.

‘And don’t take this the wrong way,’ said Casimir with a grin, ‘but I hope never to see you and your warriors again. Between being captured by greenskins, fighting a drawn-out war against them, and now a necron awakening, I’m not sure I can handle anything else.’

Uriel nodded and said, ‘It has been an honour to fight for your world, but Lord Guilliman calls us back to the Indomitus Crusade, so it is unlikely you will ever see us again.’

Casimir and Alexia stepped back as the three soldiers of the Caen Pioneers came to attention.

‘I am glad to see you all alive and well,’ said Uriel, as Elia saluted crisply. ‘After we crashed, I wasn’t sure you would survive to reach the citadel.’

‘We Caen folk are a tough old breed,’ said Elia. ‘And we don’t ever give up, isn’t that right, Vigo?’

‘Right indeed, captain,’ said Vigo.

‘Captain?’ said Uriel.

‘As of last week,’ said Elia. ‘The brass said it was due to recent reports of my meritorious conduct while in the field. So, thank you.’

‘You are a brave woman, Elia Vivaro,’ said Uriel. ‘You more than earned this new rank.’

She smiled and nodded to a shaven-headed adjutant, who brought forth a wide tube, long and made of leather, capped at either end with brass. She took it from the man, who withdrew with a curt bow, and handed it to Uriel.

‘Then accept this gift from Caen to Ultramar, from one captain to another.’

Uriel unscrewed one of the brass end pieces and looked within. He knew what it was without needing to remove it from the tube. A powerful wave of gratitude washed over Uriel, and he shook his head.

‘I thought it lost when Hellrider crashed,’ said Uriel.

‘When Sergeant Telion got us out of the crew compartment, I pulled it from the vox-aerial,’ said Elia. She shrugged. ‘It seemed the least we could do to have it remade.’

‘You have done the Fourth a greater honour than you can possibly imagine,’ said Uriel, handing the tube back to Elia, ‘but this is not mine to accept.’

Uriel moved past the colour party, leading a surprised Elia by her elbow until they stood before the remaining warriors of the Swords of Calth. Selenus stood between Petronius Nero and Brutus Cyprian, both of whom owed their lives to the ministrations of the Apothecary. Standing a little behind and to the left were Telion and Nicada, and to the right stood Pasanius and Learchus. Uriel now beckoned the two of them forward.

Harkus had repaired Pasanius’ armour and supplied Learchus with new war plate, but nothing could undo the effects of the vile alien’s gaze upon his flesh. Among them all, Learchus stood out as a warrior many centuries old, with hair like snow and the face of a patrician sage, but his eyes still burned with the fire of a youth fresh from the academies.

‘Give to Learchus what you gave to me,’ said Uriel.

Elia nodded and handed the long tube to a puzzled-looking Learchus. He took it and pulled out a long roll of stiffened fabric, densely woven from heat-retardant materials. Holding it at one end, the fresh winds coming in off the ocean caught the material and unfurled it in a billowing wave of cobalt blue, gold and silver.

A laurel-haloed gauntlet woven from gilded platinum strips held an ivory ultima upon a celestial background of amaranthine and blue that glimmered with stars picked out in silver and gold. Where the fabric of the original banner met new material, the seamstresses had made no attempt to hide the join, rather they celebrated the union of past honours and future glories. All the victorious tallies it had borne before were there, every war, every campaign and every battle – including this one. The scrollwork upon the standard’s tail-strips had been lengthened in anticipation of triumphs yet to come.

‘It is magnificent,’ said Learchus. ‘An honourable gift, but why give it to me?’

‘Because the company needs a new Ancient,’ said Uriel. ‘And I can think of no one who has earned the right to carry the colours of the Fourth into battle more than you.’

‘Uriel, I…’ said Learchus, for once rendered speechless.

‘Learchus Abantes, I charge you to bear the banner of the Fourth Company,’ said Uriel. ‘By the rank I bear, and before these warriors, I name thee Ancient Learchus, banner bearer of the Fourth Company.’

Learchus nodded and hammered his fist to his chest.

‘It will be my honour,’ he said. ‘By my deeds and with my strength, I will protect it unto death.’

‘I know you will,’ said Uriel, turning to Pasanius. He took his oldest friend’s hand and said, ‘If this fight has taught me anything, it is that I need you by my side.’

‘I’m always here, my brother,’ said Pasanius.

‘No, I mean I need you at my side,’ said Uriel. ‘Within my command squad.’

Pasanius clasped his other hand around Uriel’s. ‘It will be my honour, Uriel. I won’t let you down.’

Uriel nodded and said, ‘You, Learchus, Nero, Cyprian and Selenus – you are my guardians, my battle-brothers and my lancers.’

He stepped back to encompass them all, every one of them a warrior hero beyond measure.

They were his chosen men.

His Swords of Calth.

About the Author

Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

He slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Squad Antiocles were being pushed back. The Devastators walked their fire closer in to the combat. A heavy bolter blasted half a dozen daemons into stinking meat. A missile blew, lifting more into the air. Messinius fell back himself now, leaving it to the last moment before ordering the Assault Marines to leap from the fray. Their jets ignited, driving back the daemons with washes of flame, and they lifted up over his head, leaving four of their brothers dead on the ground. Devastator fire hammered down from above. Anti-personnel weapons set into casemates and swivel turrets on the walls joined in, but the daemons mounted higher and higher in a wave of red that flooded over the parapet.

‘Run!’ he shouted at the straggling human soldiery. ‘Run and survive! Your service is not yet done!’

The Penitent’s Arch led from the square onto a wall walk that curved around to another layer of defences. His Space Marines were already making a firing line across the entrance. A gate could be extended across the arch, sealing the walk from the square, but Messinius refrained from requesting it be closed, as the humans were still streaming past the Adeptus Astartes. Kryvesh waved the banner, whirling it through the air to attract the terrified mortals. The Space Marines fired constantly into the mass of daemons sprinting after them, exhausting their ammunition supplies. Shattered false bodies tumbled down, shot from the front and above, yet still they came, overtaking and dismembering the last warriors fleeing away from the parapet.

Squad Antiocles roared through the arch, landing behind their brethren. Messinius passed between them. For a moment he surveyed the tide of coming fury. Endless red-skinned monsters filling the square like a lake of spilled blood, washing over a score of brightly armoured Space Marine corpses left behind in the retreat. Several hundred humans lay alongside them.

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

‘Wall batteries three-seven-three through three-seven-six, target sector nine five eighty-three, Penitent’s Square, western edge. Five-minute bombardment.’

‘On whose order?’

‘Captain Vitrian Messinius, White Consuls Chapter, Tenth Company. I have the primarch’s authority.’ As he dealt with gunnery control, he was also datapulsing a request for resupply, and checking through layered data screeds.

‘Voice print and signum ident match. Transponder codes valid. We obey.’

The far side of the square erupted in a wall of flame. Heavy cannon shells detonated in a string along the rampart. High-energy beams sliced into the square, turning stone and metal instantly to superheated gas. The approaching daemons were annihilated. A few bolt-rounds cracked off as the last daemons nearing the Space Marine line were put down.

‘Company, cease fire. Conserve ammunition.’ Nobody heard him. Nobody could. He re-sent the order via vox-script. The boltguns cut out.

Penitent’s Square was a cauldron of fire so intense he could feel the heat through his battleplate’s ceramite. The ground shook under his feet and he considered the possibility that the wall would give way. The noise was so all-consuming the idea of speech lost relevance. For five minutes the Lion’s Gate tore madly at its own hide, ripping out chunks of itself in a bid to scrape free the parasites infesting its fabric, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased.

Where the Penitent’s Square had been, a twisted mass of black metal and shattered stone remained. So formidable were the defences of the Lion’s Gate that the structure beneath had not been penetrated, but it was like this, in small bursts of destruction, that they could lose this war.

Messinius accessed the gate’s noosphere. No daemons had as yet rounded the projecting Penitent’s Spur to come up against their new position. When the attack came again, which it would, it would come from the front.

An ammunition train raced down the walkway from the fortress interior and came to a squealing stop fifty yards away. Medicae personnel jumped down. A Space Marine Apothecary came with them. Human peons rushed about with heavy sack bags full of bolter magazines, passing them out to the transhumans. Spent magazines clattered to the floor. New ones were slammed home. Messinius contacted his squad leaders, taking a quick census of his surviving men, not trusting the digits that read ‘Company Casualties 23%’ blinking in the upper right of his visual field.

Through the smoke given off by burning metal on the far side of the ruined square, he saw movement. Auspex returns tripped his armour’s machine-spirit, and it blinked warnings in his helm.

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

‘My lord?’ A soft voice, one that did not belong in that moment. He ignored it.

‘Engage at fifty-yard range. Make every shot count.’

The ammunition train was hurriedly relieved of their allotted supplies, and sped off, bearing the worst-wounded, to aid whichever beleaguered unit needed it next.

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

The voidships in orbit were beginning to fire. Their targeting systems were perturbed by the boiling warp energy and the vortex in constant motion over the Imperial Palace, and many shots went wide, crashing down into the Anterior Barbican, a few falling as far out as Magnifican.

Red monsters bounded towards them, as numerous as before, as if their efforts to thin them had been for naught.

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

‘My lord, your duty rotation begins in half an hour. You told me to wake you.’

This time he heard. Bolters boomed. Messinius froze them with a thought, and with another he shut down the hypnomat entirely.

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

‘My lord,’ his servant said. Selwin, he was called. ‘You are returned from your recollections?’

‘I am awake, Selwin, yes,’ Messinius said irritably. His mouth was dry. He wanted to be left alone.

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

Messinius nodded and rubbed his face. It felt numb. Selwin flicked a number of toggles on the hypnomat and it powered down, the steady glow of its innards fading to nothing and winking out, taking the immediacy of Messinius’ memories with it.

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

The hypnomat’s primary use was to instil knowledge without active learning on the subject’s part, but it could reawaken memories to be lived again. Full immersion in the hypnomat required cooperation from Messinius’ catalepsean node, and coming out of the half-sleep was never as easy as true waking. Reliving past events dulled his wits. Messinius reminded himself to be guarded. He forgot sometimes that he was not on Sabatine any more. The local saying ‘This is Terra’ encompassed a multitude of sins. Spying was among them.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Personal debriefing.’ He shook his head and unplugged the hypnomat’s input cables from the neural ports set into his arms and neck. ‘Nothing new learned.’

Selwin nodded, then hesitantly said, ‘If I may be so bold as to ask, why do it, my lord, if you expect to learn nothing?’

‘Because I can always be wrong,’ Messinius said. He pointed at the hypnomat. It was a bulky machine set on a trolley, but not too big for an unaltered man to move. ‘Take that away. Inform my armourer I will be with him in a few minutes.’

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

The Swords of Calth © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. The Swords of Calth, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-80026-519-6

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

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To my fellow brothers and sisters of Ultramar,
who demanded Uriel & Pasanius march again.
Courage and Honour to you all!

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